Anne Slawig1, Tobias Wech1, Johannes Tran-Gia1,2, Henning Neubauer1, Thorsten Bley1, and Herbert Köstler1
Imaging of the beating heart is one of the main challenges in fast MRI. Balanced
steady state free precession sequences are fast, yield high signal and
have excellent contrast between blood and myocardium. Unfortunately, they are sensitive
to field inhomogeneities, which lead to banding artifacts, considerably reducing
the image quality. As the steady state tolerates small shifts in frequency it
is possible to acquire a frequency- modulated bSSFP.
Our study uses such a
frequency-modulated approach in combination with a multi-frequency
reconstruction to obtain banding free CINE images, with high signal and good
contrast.