Abstract #0073

kT PINS RF Pulses for Low-Power Field Inhomogeneity-Compensated Multislice Excitation

Anuj Sharma¹, Samantha J. Holdsworth², Rafael O'Halloran², Eric Aboussouan², Anh Tu Van², Julian R. Maclaren², Murat Aksoy², Victor Andrew Stenger³, Roland Bammer², William A. Grissom¹

¹Biomedical Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, United States; ²Radiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States; ³Medicine, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, United States

A new class of patient-tailored multiband RF pulses "kT-PINS" is presented that combines PINS multiband excitation pulses with kT-points 3D patient-tailored excitation pulses, enabling simultaneous excitation of multiple slices and compensation of transmit field inhomogeneities. An interleaved greedy and local optimization algorithm was developed to design the pulses. Phantom experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the pulses in reducing flip angle inhomogeneity caused by transmit field inhomogeneity at 7T.