Ersin Bayram1, Vijay Nimbargi2, Ramesh Venkatesan2, Zachary Slavens1, Sabina Prato1, Manojkumar Saranathan3, Lloyd Estkowski1, Anthony Vu1
1MRI, GE Healthcare, Waukesha, WI, USA; 2GE Healthcare, Banglore, India; 3Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Rochester, MN, USA
Fully balanced steady-state free precession techniques yield high signal in short scan times and have found applications in abdominal MRI for visualizing liver vasculature, biliary and small bowel imaging. Banding artifacts due to signal cancellations and robust fat suppression are the two challenges with these pulse sequences. Traditional fat suppression methods perform suboptimally due to their sensitivity to field inhomogeneities and compromise the steady state. We report a new technique that combines fully balanced steady-state free precession scan with a two-point Dixon fat-water reconstruction algorithm to generate high resolution fat-only and water-only image within breath-hold times.