Spherical harmonic shim analysis of B0 distributions in cardiac imaging planes from 921 subjects

Cardiac functional scans adopting bSSFP sequences suffer from dark band artifacts due to B0 inhomogeneity. The best remedy to mitigate this issue is through cardiac B0 shimming. A limited understanding of the B0 conditions in clinical diagnostic orientations impedes the development of an optimal B0 shim strategy in the human heart. Here we perform a theoretical analysis of spherical harmonic B0 shim at 3 T using a static global approach and slice-specific dynamic shim updating in the short-axis views of human hearts from 921 subjects as a starting point for the development of optimized cardiac B0 shim strategies.