Design of Ramped RF Excitation Pulses with Built-In Out of Slab Saturation for 3D - TOF Angiography

Daniel Kopeinigg^1,2, Roland Bammer¹

Imaging of the intracranial arteries is frequently performed with 3D TOF angiography. In this work, we used Shinnar-Le-Roux (SLR) transform to design a minimum-phase small tip angle ramped excitation pulse with a built in one-sided saturation band to either suppress the venous/or arterial signal in 3D TOF acquisitions. Our results showed that this RF pulse is veryeffective in saturating superior inflow without the use of additional gradient spoilers and thus shortens the overall TR time.