Balanced Steady-State Free Precession Abdominal Imaging Using Two-Point Dixon Fat/Water Decomposition

Ersin Bayram¹, Vijay Nimbargi², Ramesh Venkatesan², Zachary Slavens¹, Sabina Prato¹, Manojkumar Saranathan³, Lloyd Estkowski¹, Anthony Vu¹

Fully balanced steady-state free precession techniques yield high signal in short scan times and have found applications in abdominal MRI for visualizing liver vasculature, biliary and small bowel imaging. Banding artifacts due to signal cancellations and robust fat suppression are the two challenges with these pulse sequences. Traditional fat suppression methods perform suboptimally due to their sensitivity to field inhomogeneities and compromise the steady state. We report a new technique that combines fully balanced steady-state free precession scan with a two-point Dixon fat-water reconstruction algorithm to generate high resolution fat-only and water-only image within breath-hold times.