Curtis Nathan Wiens1, Bryan Thomas Addeman2, Shawn Joseph Kisch2, Catherine D. Hines3, Hanzhou Yu4, Jean H. Brittain4, Scott B. Reeder3,5, Charles A. McKenzie1,2
1Physics, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada; 2Medical Biophysics, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada; 3Biomedical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA; 4Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare; 5Radiology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wiconsin, USA
Both single and multi-flip angle methods have been used to minimize the T1 bias that can cause a difference between the true fat mass fraction and the fat fraction estimated by IDEAL-SGPR. Breath-hold restrictions in abdominal imaging require that data for each flip angle have short acquisition times, and thus with lower SNR, when acquiring multiple flip angles. To examine this tradeoff, the noise efficiency of using 1-5 flip angles for fat fraction measurement was determined. Measurements in phantoms of varying water-fat fractions demonstrated that a single flip angle is the most noise efficient method to determine the fat fraction.