Selective Excitation of Dissolved 129Xe

General Leung¹, Graham Norquay¹, Rolf F. Schulte², Jim M. Wild¹

Selective excitation of 129Xe is challenging owing to the relatively low solubility of xenon coupled with the lower blood volume to gas ratio in the lungs. 129Xe gas signal is approximately 2 orders of magnitude greater than the dissolved signal and commonly used excitation pulses continue to excite the dissolved gas, corrupting non cartesian image reconstruction. Highly selective pulses, taking into account the very short T2* of the dissolved phase are evaluated in this work. Additionally, an implementation of the binomial composite pulse is proposed and evaluated.