Patent ID: 7683618

Claim:
A method for slice selective excitation for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) implemented by a MRI system comprising a magnet system and a controller, wherein the method comprises: a. applying a B 0 field from the magnet system; b. applying a STABLE pulse from the magnet system comprising of a BIR-4 envelope sampled by a plurality of subpulses with a duration, where amplitude and frequency modulation functions of the BIR-4 envelope are slowly varying with respect to the duration of the subpulses; c. reading out a portion of k-space to obtain k-space data through the magnet system; d. repeating b-c until sufficient k-space data has been acquired; e. taking a Fourier Transform of the k-space data through the controller; and f. generating an image from the Fourier Transform of the k-space data through the controller.