Diego Hernando1, Scott B. Reeder1, 2
1Department of Radiology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States; 2Department of Medical Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States
R2* measurement has multiple applications in MRI, including assessment of tissue iron overload. However, apparent R2* values are affected by the presence of fat. Fat introduces additional modulations in the acquired signal and results in large errors in R2* if not corrected. These errors can be addressed by including fat-water separation in the R2* measurement. In this work, we show that (i) fat correction is needed for robust (protocol-independent) R2* mapping, and (ii) including fat-water separation in the R2* measurement does not result in SNR penalty for R2* measurement over a wide range of true R2* values.