Reduced power multislice MDEFT imaging

A novel method is presented for acquiring multislice T1-weighted images. The method utilizes non-slice-selective inversion pulses followed by a series of slice-selective excitations. k-space is divided into a number of segments equal to the number of slices. Successive segments of k-space are assigned to successive slice-selective pulses, and the order in which the slices are excited is manipulated to ensure that images of each slice have identical contrast and point spread function (PSF). This method is applied to the MDEFT experiment, a particular version of the inversion recovery experiment. The implications of this acquisition scheme on the PSF are examined, and it is shown that, provided the k-space modulation function does not change sign, a good PSF is achieved. For a given maximum number of slices, the total experimental duration depends only on TR and the number of phase-encoding steps. A method of accelerating the experiment by multiply exciting each slice is described. An experimental demonstration of the proposed sequences is given by imaging the human head at 3 T.