Balanced SSFP (bSSFP) has been used in structural and functional MRI, but always suffered from banding artifacts. While phase cycling was widely used to reduce banding artifact, it would take more scan time. Recently, integrated SSFP (iSSFP) was introduced to acquire banding-free images in shorter scan time than phased-cycled bSSFP. In this work, multi-echo iSSFP was further developed to improve SNR and acquire ultrahigh-resolution images with moderate scan time at 7T. Phantom and in vivo experiments demonstrated that the combined image produced by weighted averaging of multi-echo iSSFP showed obvious SNR and contrast improvement and inherited the characteristics of bSSFP.
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