934 | © 2018 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/mrm Magn Reson Med. 2019;81:934–946. Received: 16 March 2018 | Revised: 6 June 2018 | Accepted: 12 June 2018 DOI: 10.1002/mrm.27446 FULL PAPER bSSFP phase correction and its use in magnetic resonance electrical properties tomography Safa Ozdemir | Yusuf Ziya Ider Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey Correspondence Yusuf Ziya Ider, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. Email: ider@ee.bilkent.edu.tr Funding information This study was supported by TUBITAK 114E522 research grant. Experimental data were acquired using the facilities of UMRAM, Bilkent University, Ankara. Purpose: Balanced steady‐state free precession (bSSFP) sequence is widely used because of its high SNR and high speed. However, bSSFP images suffer from “band- ing artifact” caused by B 0 inhomogeneity. In this article, we propose a method to remove this artifact in bSSFP phase images and investigate the usage of the corrected phase images in phase‐based magnetic resonance electrical properties tomography (MREPT). Theory and Methods: Two bSSFP phase images, obtained with different excitation frequencies, are collaged to get rid of the regions containing banding artifacts. Phase of the collaged bSSFP image is the sum of the transceive phase of the RF system and an error term that depends on B 0 and T 2 . By using B 0 and T 2 maps, this error is elimi- nated from bSSFP phase images by using pixel‐wise corrections. Conductivity maps are obtained from the uncorrected and the corrected phase images using the phase‐ based cr‐MREPT method. Results: Phantom and human experiment results of the proposed method are illus- trated for both phase images and conductivity maps. It is shown that uncorrected phase images yield unacceptable conductivity images. When only B 0 information is used for phase correction conductivity, reconstructions are substantially improved, and yet T 2 information is still needed to fully recover accurate and undistorted con- ductivity images. Conclusions: With the proposed technique, B 0 sensitivity of the bSSFP phase im- ages can be removed by using B 0 and T 2 maps. It is also shown that corrected bSSFP phase images are of sufficient quality to be used in conductivity imaging. KEYWORDS banding artifact, bSSFP, conductivity, MREPT, phase‐based 1 | INTRODUCTION Impedance imaging aims at reconstructing conductivity, σ, and permittivity, ϵ, of the tissues. Earlier methods of imped- ance imaging are electrical impedance tomography (EIT) 1,2 and magnetic induction tomography (MIT) 3 that are used to induce currents in the object by using either surface electrodes (EIT) or external coils (MIT). However, these methods yield images that have low spatial resolution in interior regions be- cause the measurements (i.e., surface potentials) are not very sensitive to electrical property perturbations relatively far from the surface. To overcome this weakness, magnetic res- onance electrical impedance tomography (MREIT) has been introduced. 4-9 In MREIT, current is induced by using surface electrodes in the frequency range of 10 Hz–10 kHz and the resulting magnetic field is measured by MRI to reconstruct