In-vivo image acceleration with an 8-channel local B0 coil array and parallel imaging in a 9.4T human MR scanner

We further developed a recent idea called spread spectrum MRI to reduce the sampling time by rapidly modulating spins with localized magnetic fields during signal readout. Given phantom experiments tested and safety evaluation for human subjects performed, this time, we started in-vivo measurements of human head with multi-slice FLASH sequence accelerated by local B0 coil modulations, and examined the reconstructed image quality. Sinusoidal modulation schemes in various phase offset patterns and frequencies given different scanner bandwidth were tested and compared, which were shown to boost the image acceleration from 6-fold (i.e., SENSE only) to about 8-fold in one phase-encoded dimension.