Yiu-Cho Chung1,
Yanjie Zhu1, Xin Liu1, Chao Zou1
1Paul
C. Lauterbur Research Center for Biomedical Imaging, Shenzhen Key Laboratory
for MRI, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of
Sciences, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
TSE based FLAIR at 7T is challenging due to B1 transmit field inhomogeneity and SAR limitation. We propose inversion recovery prepared PSIF (IR-PSIF) for FLAIR imaging at 7T. The short TR in PSIF shortens scan time (~5s per slice) and eliminates the need for segmentation. Use of excitation pulses instead of refocusing pulses makes PSIF less sensitive to hardware imperfections. The SNR of white matter from an IR-PSIF image is about 44, and is half that of FLAIR. Such SNR would be sufficient for diagnostic purposes. We believe IR-PSIF may be a fast and robust alternative for FLAIR at 7T.