The echo shifts commonly applied in turbo spin-echo
Dixon imaging for chemical shift encoding affect the
signal-to-noise ratio in the resulting in-phase and
water images not only directly through the noise
propagation in the water-fat separation, but also
indirectly through the turbo spin-echo sequence. In this
work, an optimization of the signal-to-noise ratio is
proposed under the constraint of a fixed spacing between
successive refocusing pulses. On the example of
dual-echo Dixon imaging, it is shown to lead to shorter
optimal echo shifts and to suggest a variable readout
gradient strength, bandwidth and sampling window length
per echo shift, which permits enhancing the
signal-to-noise ratio.
