Iterative Fat-Water Separation in Steady State with Dedicated MRI Systems

Luca Balbi¹, Jochen Leupold², Marco Vicari¹

Low-field dedicated MR tomographs are an interesting compromise between management costs and diagnostics requirements, above all when provided with modern MRI techniques, potentially benefiting of the reduced T1 value with respect to high-field. An example of such techniques is a 'Dixon'-like iterative fat-water separation post-processing of MRI data acquired by means of SSFP multi-echo sequences. This is indeed a fruitful union allowing to choose proper echo times to reduce possible inhomogeneity-induced artifacts, leading to an appreciable SNR efficiency and, above all, providing a strong diagnostic impact. Very promising results are shown, obtained by a 3D three-echo SSFP-FID sequence on a phantom consisting of a vacuum-sealed packed swine bacon.