Use of Simulated Annealing for the Design of Fat-Suppressed Multiple Repetition Time Balanced SSFP

Kuan J. Lee¹, Hsu-Lei Lee¹, Jrgen Hennig¹, Jochen Leupold¹

Balanced SSFP has high SNR efficiency but often a strong fat signal as well. The fat signal can be suppressed by modifying the spectral profile to place a stopband at the fat frequency. Using multiple TRs and pulses allows the spectral profile to be changed greatly, but the increased number of parameters makes it impossible to test every parameter combination. Until now, parameters for multiple TR SSFP have been chosen by trial-and-error or by using an approximate linear model. We report on the novel use of simulated annealing to search parameter combinations for optimal fat-suppressed multiple TR SSFP at 3T.