Spiral Water-fat Imaging with Integrated Off-resonance Correction on a Clinical Scanner

Purpose: To integrate water-fat-resolved spiral gradient-echo imaging with off-resonance correction into a clinical MR scanner and to evaluate its basic feasibility and performance.

Materials And Methods: Three-point chemical shift imaging was implemented with forward and strongly T(2)*-weighted reverse spiral sampling and with off-resonance correction after water-fat separation. It was applied in a volunteer study on single breathhold abdominal imaging, which included a brief comparison with Cartesian sampling.

Results: Water-fat-resolved, off-resonance-corrected forward and reverse three-dimensional interleaved spiral imaging was found to be feasible on a clinical MR scanner with only minor changes to the existing data acquisition and reconstruction, and to provide good image quality. Three-point chemical shift encoded data thus support both, water-fat separation and off-resonance correction with high accuracy.

Conclusion: The combination of chemical shift encoding and appropriate postprocessing could pave the way for water-fat-resolved spiral imaging in clinical applications.