Noise Performance of IDEAL Considering Relaxation and Multiple Spectral Peaks of Fat

Stephan van Zyl¹, Peter Brnert², Holger Eggers², Michael M. Morlock¹

In the past, water/fat separation algorithms like IDEAL have been further refined to account for finite signal lifetime (T2*) and the multi-peak nature of the fat spectrum. IDEAL is known to obtain good noise performance. Here, the noise performance of T2*-IDEAL and MP-IDEAL was evaluated using the Cramr-Rao bound (CRB). The results were independently verified with the effective number of signal averages (NSA) obtained by Monte Carlo simulations and phantom experiments. Investigations have shown that a reduction in NSA is to be expected when using T2*-IDEAL and MP-IDEAL. Short encoding times are therefore absolutely essential.