Magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF) serial artificial neural network (ANN) sequence design

摘要

Example apparatus and methods employ an artificial neural network (ANN) to automatically design magnetic resonance (MR) pulse sequences. The ANN is trained using transverse magnetization signal evolutions having arbitrary initial magnetizations. The trained up ANN may then produce an array of signal evolutions associated with a pulse sequence having user selectable pulse sequence parameters that vary in degrees of freedom associated with magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF). Efficient and accurate approaches are provided for predicting user controllable MR pulse sequence settings including, but not limited to, acquisition period and flip angle (FA). The acquisition period and FA may be different in different sequence blocks in the pulse sequence produced by the ANN. Predicting user controllable MR pulse sequence settings for both conventional MR and MRF facilitates achieving desired signal characteristics from a signal evolution produced in response to an automatically generated pulse sequence.