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Abstract #2921

Consistent Region-Growing Based Dixon Water and Fat Separation for Images with Disconnected Objects

Hua Ai1, Jingfei Ma1

1The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, United States


Consistent water and fat separation in images with disconnected objects is difficult for a region-growing based Dixon method. Here, we propose to monitor and record the quality index of a recently-proposed algorithm for region-growing at each step. The quality index is then used to automatically segment the disconnected objects into separate sub-images. Finally, the sub-images are consistently recombined on the basis of water and fat spectral asymmetry and slice-to-slice phase correlation. The proposed method was tested on a total of 1106 axial in vivo leg images and was shown to reduce the number of inconsistent slices from 203 to 6.