Ken-Pin Hwang1,2, Jingfei Ma2
1Global Applied Science
Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Houston, TX, United States; 2Department
of Imaging Physics, University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston,
TX, United States
Fat suppression methods for EPI sequences are often prone to inconsistency or loss of SNR. It is observed that with parallel imaging, spatial shift of fat is small relative to the variation in background field. In this study, we evaluate the feasibility of applying water-fat separation to an echo shifting EPI sequence. Without diffusion weighting, successful water-fat separation was achieved without modifications to the algorithm. With diffusion weighting, water-fat separation was possible when phase variations from the coil sensitivity and the background field are first corrected. These phase error maps can be estimated from images acquired without diffusion weighting.