Florian Wiesinger1, Eric Fiveland2, Christopher Judson Hardy2
1Imaging Technologies, GE Global Research, Munich, Germany; 2MRI Laboratory, GE Global Research, Niskayuna, NY, USA
Radiation damping (RD) is a second-order effect where the signal-induced current in the receiver coil is strong enough to act back on the signal-generating spins. Accordingly, it can be understood as a self-regulating flip-back pulse. Active radiation damping feedback loops have been introduced into the transmit-receive RF signal path as a means to either cancel, or amplify the natural RD effect. Recently, Huang et al used RD feedback to actively control the recovery of longitudinal magnetization immediately following a non-selective saturation pulse. Here we investigate RD feedback as a means to achieve increased SNR efficiency for short-TR, gradient-echo sequences.