Abstract #3022

Off-Resonance Banding Maps with Low Flip Angle Balanced Steady-State Free Precession

Abbas Nasiraei Moghaddam^1,2, J Paul Finn¹, Daniel B. Ennis¹

¹Radiology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, United States; ²Bioengineering, Caltech, Pasadena, CA, United States

Balanced steady-state free precession (bSSPF) is widely used for clinical exams. The off-resonance sensitivity, in particular, limits the use of bSSFP for clinical exams at field strengths greater than 1.5T. Herein we highlight the signal characteristics of the bSSFP pulse sequence for high and low flip angles in regions that are on- and off-resonance. Low flip angle bSSFP can be used to map off-resonance bands with bright image contrast. This is useful for discriminating image features that have low bSSFP signal intensity when high flip angles are employed and regions of off-resonance.