Fat Water Separation Using a Prepulse for Short Echo Space FSE

Andrew J. Wheaton¹

Prevailing Dixon-based fat-water separation methods use multiple images acquired at different echo times. In FSE-based implementations, the requirement of a range of echo times restricts its use to relatively long echo spacings. Moreover, since the data are acquired at different echo times, time-dependent sources of background phase (i.e. eddies) are not uniform in each dataset. This study proposes using a binomial prepulse to evolve fat and water isochromats. The prepulse can be coupled to any readout, including short echo-space FSE (i.e. SPACE, CUBE, HASTE). The feasibility of using such a scheme is demonstrated in short-echo space 3D FSE.