Patent ID: 7132828

Claim:
In magnetic resonance imaging using steady state free precession (SSFP), a method of reducing banding artifacts comprising the steps: a) establishing a steady state at one resonant frequency, with a specific spatial banding pattern, b) acquiring a first subset of a full spatial frequency data set, c) changing to a steady state having a different resonant frequency and banding pattern, d) acquiring a second subset of the full spatial frequency data set, e) repeating steps c) and d) until a full data set is collected, f) estimating a spatial banding pattern for each frequency, and g) reconstructing an image using the estimated spatial banding patterns, and the known spatial frequency encoding of the acquired data using an inversion of the matrix equation Y=Em where Y is the vector of the acquired data, Y=[y 1 T , . . . , y n T ] T , E is the encoding matrix, E=[(F 1 S 1 ) T , . . . , F m S n ) T ] T m is the object being imaged S i is a known distortion operator of the i th image, F i is the Fourier matrix of a specific k-space trajectory.