Water-Fat Identification in Dual-Echo Dixon Imaging

Holger Eggers¹

While the separation of two signal components with fixed difference in resonance frequency is usually straightforward in dual-echo Dixon imaging, establishing their correspondence to water and fat signals is more intricate. To increase the robustness and to decrease the complexity of the separation, a direct identification of water or fat signals is desirable. In the present work, an approach to such a direct identification in dual-echo Dixon imaging is proposed, which exploits the spectral complexity of fat for a differentiation between water and fat signals. Its potential is analyzed theoretically and demonstrated experimentally on high-resolution pelvic imaging.