Ananth J. Madhuranthakam1, Ann Shimakawa2, Huanzhou Yu2, Martin P. Smith3, Reed F. Busse4, Scott B. Reeder5, Neil M. Rofsky3, Jean H. Brittain4, Charles A. McKenzie6
1Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Boston, MA, USA; 2Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, USA; 3Radiology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; 4Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Madison, WI, USA; 5Radiology, Medical Physics, Biomedical Engineering and Medicine, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA; 6Medical Biophysics, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada
Water-fat separation with T2-weighted 3D-FSE-IDEAL requires three separate images at different echo times with respect to the spin echo. Rather than acquiring each of these echoes in separate TRs, we developed a technique to acquire two gradient echoes per refocusing pulse in each TR. Further, to acquire the optimal echo shifts that maximize SNR performance we used fractional readout acquisition. Utilizing all the four gradient echoes with a combined IDEAL homodyne reconstruction, we are able to obtain high quality water-fat separated 3D images of both breasts with near-isotropic ~1.5 mm resolution in approximately 7 minutes.