Adapting magnetic resonance imaging performance using nonlinear encoding fields

Nonlinear spatial encoding fields for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) hold great promise to improve on the linear gradient approaches. Unlike the linear techniques, the nonlinear encoding leads to a spatially varying signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This paper demonstrates the possibility to tailor the encoding fields to focus the high SNR areas to a region of interest. To achieve this, a metric is derived to quantify the spatially dependent performance for arbitrary encoding schemes.