Abstract #0632

Gold G, Hargreaves B, Brittain J, Reeder S, Yu H

Three-dimensional imaging of articular cartilage with fat suppression is useful in both the clinical and research settings. Wide use of these technqiues, however, is limited by long scan times. We have developed a fat-water separation method based on IDEAL (Iterative Decomposition of water and fat with Echo Asymmetry and Least-squares estimation) that acquires multiple echoes per TR. We compared multi-echo IDEAL gradient echo imaging (IDEAL-GRE) to fat-suppressed spoiled gradient echo imaging (FS-SPGR) in the knees of healthy volunteers at 1.5T. Multi-echo IDEAL-GRE provides robust water-fat separation, shorter imaging times, and higher cartilage SNR efficiency than FS-SPGR.