RF pulses with built-in saturation sidebands for MRI applications

A RF Excitation pulse for MRI applications has built-in saturation sidebands, thereby reducing the time for an excitation sequence. The pulse is created using the Shinnar-Le Roux (SLR) transform and designing beta-polynomials for a desired image slice excitation and for saturation of RF excitation such as by de-phasing in regions adjacent to the desired image slice. The beta-polynomials are combined and an inverse SLR transform creates the RF pulse from the combined beta-polynomial.