Karl Kristopher Vigen1, Christopher J. Francois1, Huanzhou Yu2, Ann Shimakawa2, Jean H. Brittain3, Scott B. Reeder1
1Radiology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA; 2Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, USA; 3Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Madison, WI, USA
Separation of water and fat signals is of great importance in cardiac imaging, both to improve visualization of pathology through fat suppression and for direct visualization of fat-containing pathology. Separation of fat and water was achieved using a cardiac gated segmented k-space multi-echo chemical shift based water fat separation method (IDEAL). The use of a multi-echo sequence and the ability to add an inversion recovery pulse and/or T2-preparation allows rapid acquisition of separated fat and water images for important clinical applications, including morphological imaging, delayed enhancement imaging, and black-blood imaging.