Huanzhou Yu1, Ann Shimakawa1, Scott B. Reeder2, Charles A. McKenzie3, Jean H. Brittain4
1Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, USA; 2Departments of Radiology, Medical Physics, Biomedical Engineering and Medicine, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA; 3Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada; 4Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Madison, WI, USA
Multi-point water-fat separation techniques rely on different water-fat phase shifts at multiple echo times to estimate the Bo fieldmap, water and fat. By utilizing the fieldmap smoothness, water-fat ambiguity can be resolved. However, these methods may be sensitive to eddy currents induced phase errors. In this work, the conventional phase-sensitive water-fat separation (first step) is followed by a fitting algorithm based on magnitude images (second step) for fine-tuning. The second step relies on the results from the first step for initial conditioning. The two-step approach is effective at removing phase errors for applications in both qualitative and quantitative water-fat separation.