Rapid Fat Suppressed Imaging: Application to the Cartilage and the Breast

Q. Peng, R. W. McColl, P. T. Weatherall Radiology, UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, United States, Radiology, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, United States INTRODUCTION Fat suppression is an important MRI procedure widely employed in many research and clinical applications. Fat suppression reduces chemical shift artifacts, enhances lesion conspicuity, and improves the dynamic range of interested lean tissues. With the development of modern MR technology, rapid short-TR, gradient echo imaging techniques have gained popularity due to their ability to obtain high quality images in short acquisition times. Rapid fat suppression in these sequences is a challenge due to the relatively short T1 and long T2 of fat. A novel rapid fat suppression strategy has been described recently to achieve rapid and effective fat suppression (1). The novel approach combines fat presaturation with sustained water-selective, spatial-spectral excitation (SSE) in a segmented gradient echo shot. Therefore, a long echotrain-length (ETL) can be achieved without the introduction of severe artifacts from fat into the resultant images. An implementation of the novel strategy, which combines fat presaturation using spectral partial inversion recover (SPIR) with water selective SSE (1-1), has been tested and verified at 1.5T. In this work, a different implementation of this strategy is introduced and tested on cartilage and bilateral breast imaging.