Rainer Schneider1, 2, Dieter Ritter1, Jens Haueisen2, Josef Pfeuffer1
1Siemens Healthcare, Erlangen, Germany; 2Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Informatics, TU Ilmenau, Ilmenau, Germany
Parallel transmission (pTx) has been shown to enable B1 and B0 inhomogeneity mitigating spatially selective pulses. The majority of studies uses multichannel spatially selective pulses based on a spiral trajectory design and analyze the potential of pulse acceleration due to the additional rf transmit channels. Here, spatially-selective pulses based on a rectilinear EPI trajectory design (2DRF) are successfully implemented on a parallel transmission system. Further, the differences in excitation performance compared to one channel pulses are analyzed and demonstrated in simulations and phantom experiments. In conclusion, a second rf transmit channel significantly increases the excitation accuracy of optimized 2DRF pulses.