Joseph Dagher1, Ali Bilgin2, Timothy Reese3, Georges El Fakhri1
1Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States; 2Departments of Biomedical Engineering and, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, United States; 3Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
We propose a joint acquisition-processing solution to the problem of field map estimation. Our optimizer carefully chooses three echo times that guarantee robust and accurate field map estimation using the reconstruction algorithm over an arbitrary spectral range of inhomogeneity values. We show that our method is not subject to the traditional accuracy-robustness trade-off. The resulting implications include: improved robustness by removing the bound on the shortest echo time difference, enhanced spectral estimation over a large dynamic range of inhomogeneity values, and eliminating the need for phase unwrapping. Phantom experiments confirm these conclusions.