• Anjali Datta, Joseph Y Cheng, Brian A Hargreaves, Corey A Baron, and Dwight G Nishimura.
• Stanford University, David Packard Electrical Engineering 350 Serra Mall, Rm. 308, Stanford, California, USA.
• Magn Reson Med. 2018 Jun 1; 79 (6): 2944-2953.

PurposeTo mitigate artifacts from through-plane flow at the locations of steady-state stopbands in balanced steady-state free precession (SSFP) using partial dephasing.MethodsA 60° range in the phase accrual during a TR was created over the voxel by slightly unbalancing the slice-select dephaser. The spectral profiles of SSFP with partial dephasing for various constant flow rates and during pulsatile flow were simulated to determine if partial dephasing decreases through-plane flow artifacts originating near SSFP dark bands while maintaining on-resonant signal. Simulations were then validated in a flow phantom. Lastly, phase-cycled SSFP cardiac cine images were acquired with and without partial dephasing in six subjects.ResultsPartial dephasing decreased the strength and non-linearity of the dependence of the signal at the stopbands on the through-plane flow rate. It thus mitigated hyper-enhancement from out-of-slice signal contributions and transient-related artifacts caused by variable flow both in the phantom and in vivo. In six volunteers, partial dephasing noticeably decreased artifacts in all of the phase-cycled cardiac cine datasets.ConclusionPartial dephasing can mitigate the flow artifacts seen at the stopbands in balanced SSFP while maintaining the sequence's desired signal. By mitigating hyper-enhancement and transient-related artifacts originating from the stopbands, partial dephasing facilitates robust multiple-acquisition phase-cycled SSFP in the heart. Magn Reson Med 79:2944-2953, 2018. © 2017 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.© 2017 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.

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