Jian Zhao1,2, Radu Bolbos1, Ann Shimakawa3, Huanzhou Yu3, Xiaojuan Li1, Sharmila Majumdar1, Thomas Link1
1Radiology Department, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA; 2Radiology Department, The Third Hospital of Hebei Medical University, Shijiazhuang, Hebei, China; 3GE Healthcare ASL West, Menlo Park, CA, USA
Iterative Decomposition of Water and Fat with Echo Asymmetry and Least-Squares Estimation (IDEAL) is a promising MRI technique for robust fat and water separation. The goal of this study is to assess image quality, fat suppression and fat-water separation of single-peak (SP) and multiple-peak (MP) IDEAL imaging to fat saturated fast spin-echo (FSE) imaging in knee osteoarthritis (OA) patients. Twenty knee OA patients underwent MRI at 3T. Fluid-cartilage contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) efficiency was significantly higher for SP IDEAL and MP IDEAL compared with FSE imaging. IDEAL sequence can provide excellent contrast between cartilage and fluid and MP shows better image quality.