Ozan Sayin1, John A. Derbyshire2, Liheng Guo1, Daniel A. Herzka1
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United States; 2Tornado Medical Systems, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Recent advancements in parallel imaging and/or image reconstruction (e.g. Compressed Sensing) have led to the common employment of nonconventional and irregular phase encode ordering schemes. For balanced steady-state free precession (b-SSFP) MRI, such sequences can be problematic in terms of eddy current artifacts due to rapid jumps in k-space trajectories from one TR to the next. In this work, we explore and characterize a previously-proposed technique, through-slice dephasing, as an efficient technique for eddy current artifact suppression. We demonstrate the utility of the technique in vivo, and further analyze it via b-SSFP simulations.