Simultaneous multislice imaging techniques are widely used to accelerate the acquisition process, however, non-ideal coil geometries can introduce noise enhancement. This effect can be reduced by using the virtual-conjugate-coil technique, in which case the g-factors will be dependent of the object background phase. It has been shown that an optimal phasemap exists that minimizes the g-factors. We have used 3D tailored RF pulses to approximate the optimal phase distribution in each simultaneously acquired slice to reduce the noise amplification in phantom and also in vivo. Our results imply that g-factors can be reduced significantly while flip angle homogeneity remains reasonable.
This abstract and the presentation materials are available to members only; a login is required.