amplitudes for bssfp and is demonstrated by an analytical closed form expression that returns the flip angle based on the preceding and desired magnetization in bssfp although we are not targeting the steady state an appropriate catalyzation preparation scheme is still required to minimize signal oscillations magnitude to and phase and associated artifacts stable echo amplitudes and phases are important especially in bssfp to minimize imaging artifacts common catalyzation schemes are the u03b1 2 tr 2 pulse linearly increasing ramp and kaiser windowed ramp it has been demonstrated that the kaiser windowed ramp is an effective scheme to minimize oscillations over a wide and controllable range in an example of the invention we have implemented the kaiser ramp catalyzation with all bssfp acquisitions to minimize off resonance artifacts we also used the matrix bloch formulation to present the calculations and simulations in summary this invention aims to demonstrate a method for calculating flip angles to generate echoes at predefined amplitudes in balanced ssfp the method also can optimize the integral of the signal versus time curve for any arbitrary signal profile we present this invention first by simulations followed by phantom experiments and finally with volunteer imaging using an inflow based mr angiography technique an algorithm is introduced to calculate flip angles to produce a prescribed shape of echo amplitudes which can then.