Gradient waveform design for variable density sampling in Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Understand

Fast coverage of k-space is a major concern to speed up data acquisition in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and limit image distortions due to long echo train durations.

• The hardware gradient constraints (magnitude, slew rate) must be taken into account to collect a sufficient amount of samples in a minimal amount of time.
• However, sampling strategies (e.g., Compressed Sensing) and optimal gradient waveform design have been developed separately so far.
• The major flaw of existing methods is that they do not take the sampling density into account, the latter being central in sampling theory.