Fig. 6.

Axial ZTE phantom images obtained with constant pulse duration but varying dwell time. As the dwell time gets shorter, blurring and shadow artifacts become more apparent in (a–c). Although artifacts in images with hard pulse excitation are corrected inside the main lobe of the sinc-shaped excitation profile indicated by the dashed circle, the outside region still suffers from artifacts (d–f). The new algorithm, along with phase-modulated RF pulse excitation (g–i) removes the artifacts