Jing Yuan1, Tzu-Cheng Chao2, Riad S. Ababneh3, Yi Tang1, Lawrence P. Panych1, Bruno Madore1
1Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; 2National Taiwan University, Taipei; 3Department of Physics, Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan
We present a novel fat-water separation strategy that combines a short spatial-spectral (SPSP) excitation with a TE-modulation acquisition scheme. The hybrid strategy effectively combines their strengths, and mitigates each others weaknesses. A SPSP pulse as short as 2ms suppresses most fat signals, and residual fat signals are identified by a varying TE acquisition in each time frame. Such modulations essentially label the phase of fat signals, by which fat is identified and removed through temporal processing in reconstruction. Higher temporal resolution could be achieved than with a normal SPSP excitation or a multi-echo Dixons separation.