• Koji Tanabe, Keiichi Nishikawa, Tsukasa Sano, Osamu Sakai, and Hernán Jara.
• Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology, Tokyo Dental College, Chiba, Japan. kotanabe@tdc.ac.jp
• J Magn Reson Imaging. 2010 May 1; 31 (5): 1277-81.

PurposeTo test a newly developed fat suppression magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) prepulse that synergistically uses the principles of fat suppression via inversion recovery (STIR) and spectral fat saturation (CHESS), relative to pure CHESS and STIR. This new technique is termed dual fat suppression (Dual-FS).Materials And MethodsTo determine if Dual-FS could be chemically specific for fat, the phantom consisted of the fat-mimicking NiCl(2) aqueous solution, porcine fat, porcine muscle, and water was imaged with the three fat-suppression techniques. For Dual-FS and STIR, several inversion times were used. Signal intensities of each image obtained with each technique were compared. To determine if Dual-FS could be robust to magnetic field inhomogeneities, the phantom consisting of different NiCl(2) aqueous solutions, porcine fat, porcine muscle, and water was imaged with Dual-FS and CHESS at the several off-resonance frequencies. To compare fat suppression efficiency in vivo, 10 volunteer subjects were also imaged with the three fat-suppression techniques.ResultsDual-FS could suppress fat sufficiently within the inversion time of 110-140 msec, thus enabling differentiation between fat and fat-mimicking aqueous structures. Dual-FS was as robust to magnetic field inhomogeneities as STIR and less vulnerable than CHESS. The same results for fat suppression were obtained in volunteers.ConclusionThe Dual-FS-STIR-CHESS is an alternative and promising fat suppression technique for turbo spin echo MRI.Copyright 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

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