Magnetic resonance in medicine : official journal of the Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine
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In echo-planar-based diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), the evaluation of diffusion parameters such as apparent diffusion coefficients and anisotropy indices is affected by image distortions that arise from residual eddy currents produced by the diffusion-sensitizing gradients. Correction methods that coregister diffusion-weighted and non-diffusion-weighted images suffer from the different contrast properties inherent in these image types. Here, a postprocessing correction scheme is introduced that makes use of the inverse characteristics of distortions generated by gradients with reversed polarity. ⋯ Furthermore, the acquisition of an additional dataset with moderate diffusion-weighting as suggested by Haselgrove and Moore (Magn Reson Med 1996;36:960-964) is not required. With phantom data it is shown that the theoretically expected symmetry of distortions is preserved in the images to a very high degree, demonstrating the practicality of the new method. Results from human brain images are also presented.
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This work describes a new approach to multipoint Dixon fat-water separation that is amenable to pulse sequences that require short echo time (TE) increments, such as steady-state free precession (SSFP) and fast spin-echo (FSE) imaging. Using an iterative linear least-squares method that decomposes water and fat images from source images acquired at short TE increments, images with a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and uniform separation of water and fat are obtained. This algorithm extends to multicoil reconstruction with minimal additional complexity. ⋯ Examples in the knee, ankle, pelvis, abdomen, and heart are shown, using FSE, SSFP, and spoiled gradient-echo (SPGR) pulse sequences. The algorithm was applied to systems with multiple chemical species, and an example of water-fat-silicone separation is shown. An analysis of the noise performance of this method is described, and methods to improve noise performance through multicoil acquisition and field map smoothing are discussed.