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Abstract #3091

Discontinuities in the Distortion Field: Correction of the Fat-Shift Artifact

Lesley N. Baldwin1, K Wachowicz2, B Gino Fallone, 12

1Department of Physics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; 2Department of Oncology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada


MR images are known to suffer from geometric distortion from a variety of sources. Boundaries between fat- and water-based tissues lead to discontinuities in the distortion field and result in hyper- and hypo-intense regions which cannot be corrected using standard distortion correction procedures. We propose a number of pre-processing steps which separate the image into fat and water components and shift the fat portion of the image prior to distortion correction. The technique was successfully demonstrated on phantom images and work is underway to evolve and apply the technique to more complex in-vivo images.