Many previously reported SMS-bSSFP sequences use RF phase modulation for slice shifting, which inevitably shifts the bSSFP frequency band and is thus susceptible to banding artifacts. Another slice-shifting method is to modulate slice-select dephasing/rephasing gradients. We have studied these two strategies and showed that gradient modulation is more advantageous, since it does not modify the RF phase cycling scheme and bSSFP frequency selectivity is kept the same for all slices. We have acquired phantom and in-vivo head images using both approaches, and demonstrated that gradient modulation does not introduce banding artifacts and produces high quality images.
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