Simultaneous ing of Fat & Viable Myocardium in Delayed Enhancement Imaging - a New Approach to Fat Suppression at 1.5 & 3 Tesla Employing Multiple SPAIR Pulses

Wolfgang Gerhard Rehwald¹, Elizabeth R. Jenista², Denise L. Morell², Nayla Chaptini², Deneen M. Spatz², Enn-Ling Chen², Raymond J. Kim²

In delayed enhancement imaging (DE), fat is commonly suppressed by fat-selective saturation before readout. This is suboptimal due to its short T1. In turbo-spin echo, fat is well suppressed with the SPAIR pulse, making its combination with DE imaging desirable. Due to the inversion recovery pulse (NSIR) and TI of about 350ms, adding a SPAIR pulse with TIfat is insufficient, because fat has not fully recovered from the IR. The effective TIfat may be so short that fat ing is impossible. We developed a combination of NSIR and two SPAIR pulses to fat in DE without above limitations.