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Abstract #0912

Hyperbolic Secant RF Pulses for Simultaneous Multi-Slice Excitation with Reduced Susceptibility Artifacts

Mehran Baboli 1 , Bastien Guerin 2 , Lawrence Wald 2 , and V. Andrew Stenger 1

1 Medicine, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States, 2 Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts, United States

Hyperbolic Secant (HS) RF pulses can be used to generate a quadratic phase in the slice-select direction to reduce susceptibility induced signal dropout in regions including the frontal lobe of brain and are useful for applications such as fMRI. Recently simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) imaging techniques have been shown to provide speed increases by factors up to 12 in fMRI applications. Typically SMS excitation is accomplished by using a modulated sinc RF pulse. Additionally the Power Independent Number of Slices (PINS) pulse design has been proposed for low power SMS excitation using a series of non-selective pulses separated by z-gradient blips. This study demonstrates both modulated sinc and PINS SMS excitations weighted by an HS envelope to reduce susceptibility artifacts in the brain at 3T.

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