Michael Carl1, Mark Bydder2, Atsushi Takahashi1, Eric Han1, Graeme Bydder2
1GE Healthcare, Applied Science Lab, Milwaukee, WI, USA; 2Radiology, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA
UTE excitation usually operates near the maximum gradient slew-rates and can cause transient short-term eddy currents and gradient amplifier non-linearities that can last from tens to hundreds of microseconds and thus may produce image artifacts. We propose a sequence in which the original UTE excitation pulse is immediately followed by a spin lock pulse, applied 90 out of phase with the excitation pulse to allow the transients to decay away. We have investigated this approach by studying the results of Bloch simulations.