Artifact reduction in true-FISP imaging of the coronary arteries by adjusting imaging frequency

The presence of resonance frequency offsets often causes artifacts in images acquired with true fast imaging with steady-state precession (true-FISP). One source of resonance offsets is a suboptimal setting of the synthesizer frequency. The goal of this work was to demonstrate that shifting the synthesizer frequency could minimize the off-resonance related image artifacts in true-FISP. A simple scouting method was developed to estimate the optimal synthesizer frequency for the volume of interest (VOI). To improve fat suppression, a similar scouting method was also developed to determine the optimal frequency offset for the fat saturation pulse. Coronary artery imaging was performed in healthy subjects using a 3D true-FISP sequence to validate the effectiveness of the frequency corrections. Substantial reduction in image artifacts and improvement in fat suppression were observed by using the water and fat frequencies estimated by the scouting scans. Frequency shifting is a useful and practical method for improving coronary artery imaging using true-FISP.