Squeezed Trajectory Design for Peak RF and Integrated RF Power Reduction in Parallel Transmission MRI

High peak RF amplitude and excessive specific absorption rate (SAR) are two critical concerns for hardware implementation and patient safety in scientific and clinical research for high field MRI using parallel transmissions (pTX). In this paper, we introduce a squeezing strategy to reduce peak RF amplitude and integrated RF power via direct reshaping of the k-space trajectory. In the existing peak RF / integrated RF power optimization methods gradient amplitude or slew rate is reduced, but the k-space trajectory remains unchanged. Unlike these traditional methods, we worked directly in the excitation k-space to reshape k-space traversal by a squeezing vector in order to achieve peak RF and total RF power optimization, using a particle swarm optimization algorithm. The squeezing strategy was applied to the conventional variable density spiral (CVDS) and the variable rate selective excitation (VERSE) trajectories, dubbed SVDS (squeezed variable density spiral) and SVERSE (squeezing trajectory with VERSE), respectively, for different excitation profiles of small or large tip angles. Pulse acceleration and off-resonance effects were evaluated for an 8-ch pTX via Bloch simulation. CVDS, VERSE, SVDS, and SVERSE pulses were implemented on a 3T scanner with a 2-ch pTX. Phantom and in vivo experiments were performed for reduced FOV (rFOV) imaging. The results show that SVDS pulses simultaneously reduce integrated RF power and peak RF by about 30% on average compared to CVDS pulses for a square pattern ( $80\times80$ mm2) with flip angles of 30°, 90°, and 180°. Compared with the VERSE method under the same peak RF constraints, the SVDS method reduces integrated RF power by an average of 20% for small tip excitations for profiles of slice, rectangular, square, and circle, and has slightly reduced excitation accuracy slightly (about 0.6%, from 6.8% to 7.4%). The SVERSE method shortens the duration of the VERSE pulse by 12.8% at large ti p angle (180°). Feasibility for rFOV imaging was demonstrated with phantom and in vivo experiments with squeezed pulses.