Physics in medicine and biology
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Several methods of flip angle mapping for magnetic resonance imaging have been proposed. We evaluated the accuracy of five methods of flip angle measurement in the presence of measurement noise. Our analysis was performed in a closed form by propagation of probability density functions (PDFs). ⋯ These PDFs completely characterize the performance of each method. Mean bias and standard deviation were computed from these PDFs to more simply quantify the relative accuracy of each method over its range of measurable flip angles. We demonstrate that the phase-sensitive method provides the lowest mean bias and standard deviation of flip angle estimate of the five methods evaluated over a wide range of flip angles.