INTENSITY ARTIFACTS IN MRI CAUSED BY GRADIENT SWITCHING IN AN ANIMAL-SIZE NMR MAGNET

The switching of magnetic field gradients in MRI gives rise to eddy currents in the structural components of superconducting magnet systems. The associated magnetic fieldscause intensity artifacts which are particularly severe in some animal‐size systems. We treat theoretically three mechanisms which cause intensity artifacts in one‐dimensional projection images obtained by a spin‐echo technique. The first is an off‐resonance effect, caused by applying the refocusing pulse before the read compensation gradient pulse has decayed sufficiently. The other two mechanisms are caused by a spatial dependence of the phase accumulated by the spins at the time of formation of the echo. as a result of the eddy current fields. First, interference causes aloss of transverse magnetization because of a variation in the phase of spins which lieon the same isochromat during the read gradient pulse. Second, a variation of the phaseof the spins in a direction orthogonalto the isochromats causes spins throughout the sample to refocus at different times. These two mechanisms are fundamentally different, since interference can occur even if the main magnetic field is homogeneous, whereas improper refocusing does not. It is shown that there is no loss of intensity by the interference mechanism if phase encoding is used to form two‐dimensional images. This maywell be a major reason why images obtained by 2DFT have been found to be generally superior to thoseobtained by projection reconstruction. Experimentally, the distributionof intensity in one‐dimensional projection images of a square slice phantom is compared with theoretical intensities, estimated using eddy current fields reported in the preceding paper. Copyright © 1992 Wiley‐Liss, Inc., A Wiley Company