Shim Cycling Technique to Eliminate the Banding Artifacts in 3D BSSFP Inner Ear Images

Seong-Eun Kim¹, John A. Roberts¹, Richard Wiggins¹, Bradley D. Bolster², Dennis L. Parker¹

In this work, we present a shim cycling technique to eliminate the banding artifacts in 3D bSSFP inner ear images in which multiple image sets are acquired with different shim currents during the acquisition of each set to change the local field compensation. These preliminary results give a strong indication that shim adjustments can sufficiently shift the banding artifact in 0.4 isotropic resolution 3D TrueFISP images, allowing very uniform composite images to be obtained. It would appear that banding artifacts in higher resolution images, with even longer TR, could be corrected. This work will be important for very high-resolution 3D TrueFISP imaging of the inner ear.