Correction for chemical‐shift artifacts in 19F imaging of PFOB: Simultaneous multislice imaging

Abstract

One of the difficulties encountered in 19F NMR imaging of fluorinated blood substitutes is that these compounds often exhibit complex multipeak spectra. These peaks result in chemical-shift artifacts along the readout direction and blurred images. In addition, each peak excites a different slice (mis-selection) when a slice selection gradient is applied during the selective rf pulse. A simultaneous multislice imaging method has been developed to solve the inherent problem of mis-selection. The essence of this method is to use the two strongest peaks of the spectrum to excite controlled different multiple slices simultaneously, with or without a slice gap. The images corresponding to the two spectral lines are then separated from in- and out-of-phase images (Dixon method). This method corrects the problem of mis-selection and either improves the SNR or increases the number of slices over spectrally selective methods which image only one peak.