Suppression of artifacts in multiple-echo magnetic resonance

Abstract

Many techniques in both magnetic resonance imaging and magnetic resonance spectroscopy use two or more RF pulses to excite the spin system and detect the echo signals which form between or after the pulses. In general many different echoes form during each acquisition interval, only one of which carries the information required. The others lead to distortion of peak heights and lineshapes in MRS, and to ghost images and similar artifacts in MRI. The “coherence transfer pathway” formalism of Bodenhausen et al. allows the evolution of each echo to be studied and suggests methods of removing the unwanted signals. The general phase-cycling methods described by Bodenhausen et al. require a degree of flexibility in the control of RF pulses which is not available on all spectrometers, however, so simpler schemes requiring only 180° phase shifts have been investigated. With certain restrictions, these schemes give cancellation of the unwanted echoes during any particular acquisition interval, and in certain cases can be extended to cancel the unwanted echoes in all acquisition intervals of a multiple-echo sequence. All such schemes, however, require a large number of transients to be collected, so a second method has been investigated whereby the systematic application of magnetic field gradients can produce similar results within a single transient. Both of these approaches have been reported previously, but we introduce a novel formalism which allows the required pulse phases and gradient magnitudes to be systematically calculated, rather than empirically determined, for any pulse sequence. Examples of the application of each method to the spin-echo and TART imaging sequences are given, although both methods are equally applicable to many pulse sequences used in spectroscopy.