FIG. 6.

Effects of slice directions on local SAR distributions for the 2×8 array when designing pulses to excite axial and sagittal slices for a nominal RMSE of 0.024. Transverse Maximum Intensity Projection (MIP) images of 10g SAR of the two single-band (SB) pulses are depicted in (a) for each of the five even numbered multiband (MB) pulses. The ten SB pulse components for which SAR is shown are indexed by two numbers in parentheses, with the first number counting the MB pulses and the second number the SB component, e.g., (6,1) means it is the first SB component of the sixth MB pulse. The MIP images of 10g SAR are also shown in (b) for the final SAR resulting from exciting all of the 20 axial or sagittal slices. Note that the SB pulses for exciting sagittal slices exhibited lower and/or more localized local SAR hotspots, thereby resulting in decreased final SAR.