David H. Johnson1, Sreenath P. Narayan1, David L. Wilson1,2, Chris A. Flask1,2
1Biomedical Engineering, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA; 2Radiology, University Hospitals of Cleveland, Cleveland, OH, USA
An IDEAL acquisition based on an asymmetric spin echo acquisition (aSE) was developed for imaging mice on a 7T small animal MRI scanner. A short delay (79us - 790us) was inserted between the refocusing pulse and the readout gradient in a standard spin echo acquisition to introduce fat-water phase shift appropriate for IDEAL estimation of separate fat and water images. The aSE-IDEAL technique generated images with dramatically reduced susceptibility artifacts and improved overall image SNR in comparison to conventional spoiled gradient echo (i.e., FLASH) IDEAL images.