Sculpting 3D spatial selectivity with pairs of 2D pulses: A comparison of methods

[Display omitted] •Methods to excite 3D spatial shapes using pairs of 2D RF pulses were compared.•A method relying on a pair of SPEN-based 2D pulses provided the best results in phantoms.•This method was the only one to achieve robust ex- and in-vivo 3D selectivity.•Unfolding techniques were developed to disentangle center- and side-band contributions.•These techniques enabled a significant gradient increase that was used in the SPEN-based 2D pulses. Enhancing the specificity of the spins’ excitation can improve the capabilities of magnetic resonance. Exciting voxels with tailored 3D shapes reduces partial volume effects and enhances contrast, particularly in cases where cubic voxels or other simple geometries do not provide an optimal localization. Spatial excitation profiles of arbitrary shapes can be implemented using so-called multidimensional RF pulses, which are often limited in practice to 2D implementations owing to their sensitivity to field inhomogeneities. Recent work has shown the potential of spatio-temporally encoded (SPEN) pulses towards alleviating these constraints. In particular, 2D pulses operating in a so-called hybrid scheme where the “low-bandwidth” spatial dimension is sculpted by a SPEN strategy while an orthogonal axis is shaped by regular k-space encoding, have been shown resilient to chemical shift and B0 field inhomogeneities. In this work we explore the use of pairs of 2D pulses, with one of these addressing geometries in the x-y plane and the other in the x-z dimension, to sculpt complex 3D volumes in phantoms and in vivo. To overcome limitations caused by the RF discretization demanded by these 2D pulses, a number of “unfolding” techniques yielding images from the centerband RF excitation while deleting sideband contributions – even in cases where center- and side-bands severely overlap – were developed. Thus it was possible to increase the gradient strengths applied along the low bandwidth dimensions, significantly improving the robustness of this kind of 3D sculpting pulses. Comparisons against conventional pulses designed on the basis of pure k-space trajectories, are presented.