Tolga ukur1, Brain A. Hargreaves2, Dwight G. Nishimura1
1Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA; 2Radiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Phase-sensitive (PS) SSFP efficiently separates the fat and water resonances by exploiting the 180o phase-difference between adjacent pass-bands in balanced SSFP. This difference can be detected if all other sources introduce slow phase variations in space. However, for surface coils, the abrupt variations at the edge of the sensitivity regions can lead to fat-water misclassification in multicoil reconstructions. In this work, we propose to first obtain a reliable phase estimate by combining individual coil images. The PS-reconstruction is then performed for successful fat-water separation.