Sliding Interleaved Cylinder (SLINCY) Imaging with Dynamic Center Frequency Adjustment

Kie Tae Kwon¹, Adam B. Kerr¹, Bob S. Hu², ³, Dwight G. Nishimura¹

A sliding interleaved cylinder (SLINCY) acquisition uses a 3D concentric cylinders trajectory to reduce venetian blind artifacts. Previously, we employed the SLINCY acquisition for a non-contrast-enhanced magnetization-prepared 3D SSFP sequence to improve artery-vein contrast in the lower extremities. One challenge for this approach is to cover a large FOV without SSFP banding artifacts to yield a uniform arterial signal. In this work, we exploited the thin-slab-scan nature of SLINCY to dynamically adjust the center frequencies of slabs for banding artifact reduction using a separately acquired 2D field map. In vivo studies on healthy volunteers demonstrated the feasibility of this approach.