Closed-Form Solution for the Three-Point Dixon Method with Advanced Spectrum Modeling

Johan Berglund¹, Hkan Ahlstrm¹, Lars Johansson¹, Joel Kullberg¹

The three-point Dixon method enables high-resolution reconstruction of separate water and lipid images, by sampling the chemical shift dimension at three points. A simple single-peak model of the lipid spectrum is typically used. However, more accurate spectrum modeling has been shown to give better water and lipid estimates. The non-linear problem is typically solved by optimization in each voxel. Here, a closed-form solution is presented. The method was demonstrated in vivo for an abdominal dataset. The water/lipid separation of the 288 228 image matrix took 0.25 sec, compared to 141 sec using optimization, and resulted in high-quality fat suppression.