Fig. 5

Noise analysis by virtue of the Cramér–Rao bound. The depicted relative Cramér–Rao bounds (rCRB) can be understood as a lower bound of the squared inverse signal-to-noise ratio efficiency per unit time. One can observe that, for most cycle times (T_C), exponential decays as well as steady-state experiments are substantially less efficient than variants that exploit the entire experiment design space spanned by the hybrid state, namely the inversion recovery balanced hybrid-state free precession (IR-bHSFP) and the anti-periodic bHSFP experiments. For reference, some experiments from literature are shown as well, namely the original DESPOT⁵³, magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF)¹⁵, and pseudo-steady-state-free precession (pSSFP)¹⁹ experiments. All Cramér–Rao bounds were calculated for the relaxation times T₁ = 781 ms and T₂ = 65 ms