A high or low signal intensity stripe (band) in the frequency encoding direction. This may occur if imaging is fast enough to approach steady state: the echo preceding the excitation and the FID after the excitation may interfere constructively (high signal) or destructively (low signal). The resulting echo is dephased (with loss of signal) by the phase encode gradient except in the central stripe corresponding to zero or near-zero frequency; in this stripe, the signal persists and produces the artifact.