Belinda Ding1, Iulius Dragonu2, Patrick Liebig3, and Christopher T Rodgers1
1Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2Siemens Healthcare Limited, Firmley, United Kingdom, 3Siemens Healthineers, Erlangen, Germany
1Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2Siemens Healthcare Limited, Firmley, United Kingdom, 3Siemens Healthineers, Erlangen, Germany
This abstract showed that pTx spokes pulses greatly improves
the spin-echo image quality at 7T when compared against traditional circularly
polarised pulses. Further improvement in image quality was observed with joint
optimisation algorithms.
Figure 5: Zoomed in SE-EPI images acquired with
excitation FA of 60° and refocusing FA of 120°. Significant signal dropouts can
be observed in the case of CP pulses (green arrows). Excellent signal
homogeneity is observed when using any of the 3 pTx optimisation methods.
Signal losses at the edges (red arrows) are further recovered with matched
excitation and joint optimised pulses.
Figure 1: Pulse optimisation work flow for (2)
separately optimised pTx pulses, (3) matched excitation pTx pulses and (4)
jointly optimised pTx pulses.