Reconstruction and Frequency Mapping with Phase-Cycled BSSFP

Francesco Santini¹, Klaus Scheffler¹

Balanced SSFP images are sensitive to off-resonance effects, showing signal voids in correspondence to particular frequency values. Application of phase cycling to the RF pulses changes the frequency values at which the signal voids appear, therefore a single artifact-free image can be obtained by multiple acquisition. In this work, the data acquired from four phase cycles are fitted to the classical Freeman-Hill formula describing the signal behavior of bSSFP, and an artifact-free image together with a frequency map is obtained.