Power efficient on-resonance saturation pulses for magnetization transfer in magnetic resonance imaging

A family of new on-resonance saturation pulses for magnetization transfer in MRI is proposed. These pulses can be represented as a product of a shaped function and a cosine function. The shaped function can have many different forms, one of which is a Gaussian function. The experimental results on a 1.0 T whole body scanner show that the new on-resonance pulses are more efficient for magnetization transfer than either on-resonance binomial sequence pulses or off-resonance Gaussian pulses at the same power level.