A New Class of Encoding Techniques Using a Transmit Array: Illustration with Cylindrical Encoding

Emre Kopanoglu^1,2, Adil Firat Yilmaz^1,2, Taner Demir², Vakur B. Erturk¹, Ergin Atalar^1,2

In nearly all magnetic resonance imaging applications, data encoding is made by gradient coils, which limit the slice to a plane and the field-of-view (FOV) to a rectangle although the region-of-interest (ROI) can have an arbitrary shape. In this paper we propose a novel encoding scheme for arbitrarily shaped slices, so that the need to get unnecessary data from outside the ROI is eliminated. The proposed method uses multi-dimensional pulses for slice selection and RF pulses to encode the data instead of gradient coils, hence a slice with an arbitrary shape and FOV can be selected.