Masaki Sekino1,2, Nicolas Boulant1, Michel Luong3, Alexis Amadon1, Hiroyuki Ohsaki2, Denis Le Bihan1
1CEA, DSV, I2BM, NeuroSpin, Gif-sur-Yvette, France; 2Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Japan; 3CEA, Irfu, SACM, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
Dynamic RF shimming techniques in combination with parallel transmission have been uniquely based on the spinsf coherent dynamics, and do not account for relaxation during the RF pulses. We numerically investigated at 7 T the degradation of the spoiled gradient echo signal homogeneity when designing a transmit-SENSE pulse aimed at homogenizing the flip angle over an axial slice of a human head. Although the final uniformity may still be very good, we show that the signal inhomogeneity can sometimes deteriorate by a factor of 10 because of relaxation and should worsen even more at higher fields. The effect seems mostly noticeable around the Ernst flip angle.