Novena Rangwala1,2, Xiaohong Joe Zhou1,3
1Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, University of Illinois Medical Center, Chicago, IL, USA; 2Dept. of Bioengineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA; 3Depts. of Radiology, Neurosurgery and Bioengineering, University of Illinois Medical Center, Chicago, IL, USA
In fast spin echo (FSE) imaging, a feather-like artifact, termed as cusp artifact, is commonly seen along the phase-encoding direction in sagittal and coronal images. This artifact occurs due to specific combinations of B0-field, B1-field, and gradient non-linearity at regions beyond the field of view. To reduce this artifact, an FSE pulse sequence was modified to slightly tilt the slice selected by the RF excitation pulse. This modification, followed by simple post-processing, has been shown to noticeably decrease the cusp artifact by more than 80% in both phantom and human subjects.