Simultaneous Multi B0 Shim-Coil Calibration

Motivation: Multicoil B0 shimming improves signal quality in many MRI applications but either requires pre-calibrated ridged shim coils or lengthy coil re-calibration scans. This has precluded the use of flexible arrays and limited body applications. Goal(s): Accelerate B0 shim coil re-calibration to enable body-conforming flexible shim coil arrays. Approach: Field calibration is accelerated using physics-based reconstruction, interleaving few measured slices, and de-tangling contributions of simultaneously active shim coils. Results: Measured data is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of shim field recovery from few-slice measurements, and simulation is used to demonstrate simultaneous multi shim coil calibration, resulting in a 6.7x total acceleration. Impact: Physics-based reconstruction of coil fields from few interleaved slices, and detangling fields from simultaneous B0 shim coil activation, achieves rapid calibration. Fast subject-specific calibration will enable the use of body-conforming, flexible B0 shim arrays.