19F-Compressed-Sensing-CISS: Elimination of banding artifacts in 19F bssfp MRI/CSI without sacrificing time

The high sensitivity of balanced ssfp (bssfp) sequences makes them important techniques in MRI and CSI. The high sensitivity, however, comes at the cost of banding artifacts in either the image domain (e.g., TrueFISP) or the spectral domain (e.g., bssfp-CSI [1]). Those artifacts can be eliminated using a constructive interference in the steady state (CISS) [2] technique. This, however, results in prolonged measurement times due to the need of additional experiments with different phase cycles. Thus, in particular, the applicability of high resolved bssfp-CSI is limited. Compressed sensing (CS), a reconstruction method for undersampled MR data, was recently introduced [3]. This method allows a reduction in the time needed for experiments, but requires sparsity in the data. The lack of F background signal in living tissue leads to an intrinsically sparse signal distribution in the image domain. This makes F MRI/CSI a suitable target for CS. First applications of CS on F-CSI have been recently demonstrated [4]. The present study focuses on the application of CS in bssfp F-MRI/CSI. The purpose of this application is to gain enough time for the acquisition of additional experiments with different phase cycles. Thus, the goal is to eliminate banding artifacts in the same or less time needed for one phase cycle of a fully sampled bssfp experiment.