1Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea, Republic of, 2Department of Radiology, Seoul National University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea, Republic of
The quality of
balanced steady-state free precession is vulnerable to eddy-currents and
transient oscillations. However, the conventional centric phase-encoding (PE)
scheme makes these artifacts severe, thus needs additional compensation
strategies. In this study, we propose an improved PE scheme where k-space is
encoded from center to periphery in a group-wise manner (PE-grouping). This
reduces related artifacts by preventing big jumps in k-space along PE
direction. Also proposed were various averaging strategies that could further
eliminate the residual artifacts by averaging two full images acquired not only
with the PE-grouping, but also with the conventional centric and pairing schemes.
