ExLoc: Excitation & Encoding of Curved Slices

Hans Weber¹, Daniel Gallichan¹, Gerrit Schultz¹, Walter R. Witschey¹, Anna Masako Welz¹, Christian A. Cocosco¹, Jrgen Hennig¹, Maxim Zaitsev¹

Adaptation of the slice shape to the volume of interest would be beneficial for many MRI applications, as it allows coverage with fewer excited slices. In this work, we theoretically design and demonstrate experimentally a method (ExLoc) for excitation of customized curved slices, based on a combination of linear and nonlinear gradients. As signal is encoded along the curved surface, a local rectangular voxel shape is maintained. In contrast to linear spatial encoding, partial volume effects and through-slice dephasing is avoided.