Factorized sensitivity estimation for artifact suppression in phase‐cycled bSSFP MRI

Objective: Balanced steady‐state free precession (bSSFP) imaging suffers from banding artifacts in the presence of magnetic field inhomogeneity. The purpose of this study is to identify an efficient strategy to reconstruct banding‐free bSSFP images from multi‐coil multi‐acquisition datasets. Method: Previous techniques either assume that a naïve coil‐combination is performed a priori resulting in suboptimal artifact suppression, or that artifact suppression is performed for each coil separately at the expense of significant computational burden. Here we propose a tailored method that factorizes the estimation of coil and bSSFP sensitivity profiles for improved accuracy and/or speed. Results: In vivo experiments show that the proposed method outperforms naïve coil‐combination and coil‐by‐coil processing in terms of both reconstruction quality and time. Conclusion: The proposed method enables computationally efficient artifact suppression for phase‐cycled bSSFP imaging with modern coil arrays. Rapid imaging applications can efficiently benefit from the improved robustness of bSSFP imaging against field inhomogeneity.