Compensation of the Susceptibility Artifact in Temporal and Orbitofrontal Region in Brain using the Flat RF pulse

Introduction The susceptibility artifact in magnetic resonance (MR) image occurs by the variation in the magnetic field strength around the interface of substances having different magnetic susceptibility. Especially, this artifact has an effect on the signal loss on orbitofrontal and temporal regions of the brain. For the compensation of this artifact, we propose a new RF pulse having bilinear phase, and quadrature phase, which provides nearly constant signal intensity against the magnetic susceptibility. Methods The signal in a voxel is represented in equation (1) when assuming that the signal loss due to the magnetic susceptibility is happened by variation of the linear phase distribution of the spins only in the slice selection direction (z-direction). [1]