MR Imaging Near Orthopedic Implants with Artifact Reduction Using View-Angle Tilting and Off-Resonance Suppression

Clemens Bos¹, Chiel J. den Harder², Gert van Yperen²

Metal orthopaedic implants are known to cause substantial artifacts in MR imaging of joints, such as slice distortions and displacements of signal in the readout direction. View angle tilting aims to correct for the displacements in readout direction. Off-resonance suppression is proposed as an extension to view angle tilting. Using different slice selection gradients during excitation and refocusing limits the spectral and spatial range from which undesired signal may originate. This combination of techniques has no inherent imaging time penalty and was demonstrated to reduce metal artifacts, both in vitro and in vivo.