Joelle E.
Sarlls1,2, Wen-Ming Luh3, Carlo Pierpaoli1
1NICHD, National Institutes of Health,
Bethesda, MD, United States; 2Henry M. Jackson Foundation,
Rockville, MD, United States; 3NIMH, National Institutes of
Health, Bethesda, MD, United States
Although
spectral-spatial excitation pulses provide single-shot EPI diffusion-weighted
images without signal from fat, they are limited in the attainable minimum
slice thickness. To achieve higher
resolution, traditional fat supression methods must be used. In this work, an exhaustive investigation
was performed to determine which, if any, implementation of the
slice-selective gradient reversal method completely supressed the fat
signal. The dual-spin-echo diffusion
preparation implementation, with opposite polarity slice-select gradients for
the two 180 refocusing pulses, combined with traditional fat supression was
found to completely suppress fat in phantoms and in vivo.