Ultra High Spatio-Temporal Resolution Hepatic MRI Using a Novel 2-Point Dixon Time Resolved 3D SPGR Sequence at 3T

Manojkumar Saranathan¹, Dan Rettmann¹, Ersin Bayram², Christine Lee³, James Glockner³

Dynamic contrast enhanced MRI (DCEMRI) is commonly used in abdominal-pelvic imaging for detection and characterization of primary and metastatic lesions. It affords adequate spatial resolution but the temporal resolution is often insufficient. Optimal timing of the contrast arrival is critical in capturing the arterial phases and in improving lesion conspicuity. Traditional fat suppression methods perform suboptimally at 3T due to Bo and B1 inhomogeneities, causing non-uniform fat suppression across the image and signal loss. We report clinical results of a novel DCEMRI technique called META (Multi-Echo Tricks Acquisition) that combines a multi-echo TRICKS scan with a two-point Dixon fat-water reconstruction algorithm to generate fat-only and water-only time resolved images at very high spatio-temporal resolution. META was scanned on 23 patients referred for hepatic MRI.