Dual-Band Adiabatic Pulses in cardiac MRI: Application in Black Blood Imaging at 3T

Black-Blood imaging is an integral part of clinical cardiac MRI, due to it’s clear depiction of the cardiac morphology. Double inversion recovery, is most commonly used for black-blood contrast, by successively applying a non-selective inversion and a slice-selective reinversion. In this work, we investigate dual band adiabatic inversion pulses, as an alternative, to achieve nulling of the blood signal outside of the imaging slice. Thorough blood suppression and comparable noise performance to double inversion recovery were demonstrated in vivo while achieving an 11% reduction in SAR and a 10% reduction in pulse duration.