Elimination of transverse coherences in FLASH MRI

Fast low-angle shot (FLASH) imaging enables T1-weighted scans to be acquired in a few seconds. However, the diagnostic image quality is severely compromised by the appearance of artifactual bands parallel to the frequency encode direction. We show that the band structure arises from differences in the ability of the phase encode gradient to spoil transverse coherences that build up between successive repetition intervals. A theoretical understanding of the mechanisms involved leads to a comparison between various methods of spoiling the unwanted echoes throughout the whole field of view. Spoiler gradients whose amplitudes change linearly with phase encode step number are treated in detail. The theory predicts that the spoilers will rotate and rescale the band structure and these results are confirmed experimentally. The effect of the spoilers at a given location along the gradient is equivalent to the effect on the entire field of view of an incremented phase shift applied to the radiofrequency pulse. An appropriate rf phase shift scheme should therefore provide ideal spoiling characteristics for FLASH imaging.