Catherine DG. Hines1, Huanzhou Yu2, Ann Shimakawa2, Charles A. McKenzie3, Venkata V. Chebrolu1, Jean H. Brittain4, Scott B. Reeder1,5
1Biomedical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA; 2Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, USA; 3Medical Biophysics, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario; 4Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Madison, WI, USA; 5Radiology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
Accurate quantification of fat with MRI requires phantoms with accurately known mixtures of water and fat for the development and validation of new MRI methods that correct for confounding factors such as T2* and the complex spectrum of fat. Construction of a novel phantom containing controlled, homogeneous amounts of fat, water, and iron is described, and used to validate chemical shift based fat-water separation methods of fat quantification that correct for T2* and use accurate spectral modeling of fat. Results demonstrate the accuracy and utility of the designed phantom and excellent correlation of imaging fat-fractions to known fat-fractions.