Diego Hernando1, Zhi-Pei Liang1,
Peter Kellman2
1Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, United States; 2National
Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, United States
In
quantitative water/fat imaging, modeling the T2* decay of the signal is
necessary in order to avoid significant bias. A two-decay model with separate
decay rates for water and fat has recently been proposed as an alternative to
the one-decay model where water and fat share a common decay rate. Even
though the two-decay model is more realistic, it suffers from increased noise
sensitivity with respect to the one-decay model. In this work, we analyze
quantitatively this tradeoff between bias and standard deviation using
simulation, phantom and in vivo data. Our results show that a one-decay model
is preferable for a clinically relevant range of fat fractions and SNRs.