Advanced Three-Dimensional Tailored RF Pulse Design in Volume Selective Parallel Excitation

Volume selective excitation has a variety of uses in clinical magnetic resonance imaging, but can suffer from insufficient excitation accuracy and impractically long pulse duration in ultra-high field applications. Based on recently-developed parallel transmission techniques, an optimized 3D tailored radio-frequency RF (TRF) pulse, designed with a novel 3D adaptive trajectory, is proposed to improve and accelerate volume selective excitation. The trajectory is designed to be regular-shaped and adaptively stretched according to the size of a 3D k-space “trajectory container.” The container is designed to hold most of the RF energy deposition responsible for the desired pattern in the excitation k-space in the use of the blurring patterns caused by the multichannel sensitivity maps. The proposed method can also be used to reduce both global and peak RF energy required during excitation. The feasibility of this method is confirmed by simulations of ultra-high field cases.