Purpose: To address phase and amplitude errors for multi-point water-fat separation with "bipolar" acquisitions, which efficiently collect all echoes with alternating read-out gradient polarities in one repetition.
Materials and methods: With the bipolar acquisitions, eddy currents and other system nonidealities can induce inconsistent phase errors between echoes, disrupting water-fat separation. Previous studies have addressed phase correction in the read-out direction. However, the bipolar acquisitions may be subject to spatially high order phase errors as well as an amplitude modulation in the read-out direction. A method to correct for the 2D phase and amplitude errors is introduced. Low resolution reference data with reversed gradient polarities are collected. From the pair of low-resolution data collected with opposite gradient polarities, the two-dimensional phase errors are estimated and corrected. The pair of data are then combined for water-fat separation.
Results: We demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively remove the high order errors with phantom and in vivo experiments, including obliquely oriented scans.
Conclusion: For bipolar multi-echo acquisitions, uniform water-fat separation can be achieved by removing high order phase errors with the proposed method.
Copyright 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.