Monika Gloor1, Klaus Scheffler2, 3, Oliver Bieri1
1University of Basel Hospital, Radiological Physics, Basel, Switzerland; 2MPI for Biological Cybernetics, MRC Department, Tbingen, Germany; 3University of Tbingen, Neuroimaging and MR-Physics, Tbingen, Germany
An inversion recovery (IR) balanced steady-state free precession (bSSFP) sequence has been proposed for fast T1, T2, and spin density quantification. It has recently been shown that the presence of magnetization transfer (MT) effects on the transient phase of bSSFP experiments with short RF pulses leads to considerable deviations in calculated T1 and T2 values. In this work, an analytical expression of the two-pool IR bSSFP signal is presented taking MT effects into account. Numerical simulations of the Bloch equations are used to confirm the validity of the approximations made, and comparisons of the new equation to measurements are shown.