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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2016 Dec 1.
Published in final edited form as: Magn Reson Med. 2015 Jun 6;74(6):1661–1674. doi: 10.1002/mrm.25752

Figure 2.

Figure 2

Phantom studies for determination of the optimal flip angle (FA) in the 3-slice continuous acquisition scheme. (a): a view of the mechanical phantom (middle slice) consisting of 2 pairs of vials containing Gadolinium-doped saline with different contrast concentrations resulting in the listed T1 values (measured using a spin-echo T1 mapping sequence). The dotted circles show the selected ROIs in each vial. The phantom image shown here was acquired using the proposed pulse sequence (3-slice RF-spoiled FLASH sequence with TR = 8.0 ms) with FA=30°. (b): The CNR between the vials for the middle slice (averaged between pair 1 and pair 2) measured at different FAs using the proposed pulse sequence. Since the results in (b) show that higher FAs do not result in a noticeable loss in CNR and, in turn, are expected (assuming perfect RF spoiling) to minimize the loss of T1-weighting in case of steady-state perturbations, the relatively high FA = 30° was used in the subsequent in-vivo experiments.