A robust SSFP technique for fMRI at ultra-high field strengths

A non-balanced (nb) SSFP-based fMRI method based on CE-FAST is presented to alleviate some shortcomings of high spatial-specificity techniques commonly used in high static magnetic fields. The proposed sequence does not suffer from the banding artifacts inherent to balanced (b) SSFP, has low geometrical distortions and SAR compared to spin-echo EPI, and in contrast to previous nbSSFP implementations, is applied at a TR, theoretically prescribed for the optimum contrast. Its non-balanced gradient was chosen to just dephase the unwanted signal component (2 π dephasing per TR per voxel).

Source: Magnetic Resonance Imaging - February 19, 2018 Category: Radiology Authors: Vahid Malekian, Abbas Nasiraei-Moghaddam, Mahdi Khajehim Tags: Technical note Source Type: research