Robert James Anderson1,
Benedikt A. Poser1, Victor Andrew Stenger1
1Dept.
of Medicine, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, United States
Two methods for achieving simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) excitation, multi-band and PINS RF pulses, are combined with a fat-suppressing spectral-spatial pulse in order to minimize the time needed to acquire a single volume of the brain. Both pulses are shown to excite only the water signal across nine simultaneously excited slices of a water/oil phantom and a human brain. Without the need to run a fat-saturating pre-pulse and the almost nine-fold reduction in acquisition times due to SMS, it was possible to acquire a volume with voxel size 3.5x3.5x5mm3 within a TR of 275ms.