Abstract #2823

Krishnan S, Noll D

Rapid imaging methods such as echo-planar and spiral imaging often suffer severe distortions due to the presence of background field inhomogeneities. In particular, the gradient of the background field variation produces a local distortion, which leads to a shifting and skewing of the k-space trajectory. In this work we present a theoretical framework that illustrates the effect of background gradients on the echo-time, TE. We present an experimental verification that localised susceptibility gradients result in an effective local echo-time (TE) that can shift the k-space trajectory either away or toward the