Partial Fourier accelerated selective excitation improves pattern fidelity at 9.4 Tesla

Introduction Accelerating the process of k-space encoding has proven to be one of the major driving forces behind development of new methods for MRI signal acquisition and, subsequently, excitation. Nevertheless, acceleration techniques remain bound to obeying the Nyquist sampling theorem to prevent formation of artefacts. Localised excitation encoding has progressed with the development of Transmit SENSE [1,2], which transported receive SENSE [3] acceleration methodology to the transmit side of the MRI. Transmit SENSE, however, necessitates specialised and expensive hardware and brings with it a numerically challenging framework for pulse calculation and SAR considerations. A much discussed method of encoding acceleration, the partial Fourier paradigm (PF), has remained investigated only in 1 dimension in the shape of asymmetric slice excitation. This work presents new findings with adopted trajectories in 2 dimensions.