Efficient high-resolution RF pulse design applied to simultaneous multi-slice excitation

RF pulse design via optimal control is typically based on gradient and quasi-Newton approaches and therefore suffers from slow convergence. We present a flexible and highly efficient method that uses exact second-order information within a globally convergent trust-region CG-Newton method to yield an improved convergence rate. The approach is applied to the design of RF pulses for single- and simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) excitation and validated using phantom and in vivo experiments on a 3T scanner using a modified gradient echo sequence.