A novel method for fat suppression in RARE sequences.

Abstract

Rapid acquisition relaxation-enhanced (RARE) sequences (Hennig et al., Magn. Reson. Med. 3, 823 (1986)) utilize one or several Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill (CPMG) echo trains to sample a number of k-space lines each repetition time TR. The technique can rapidly generate multislice T2-weighted images which, as a rule, are strikingly similar in contrast to conventional T2-weighted spin-echo (SE) images. An exception to this rule is the appearance of very bright signal from fat in T2-weighted RARE images as compared to conventional T2-weighted SE images. To reduce this fat signal, we introduce a time delay, tau c, between the 90 degrees x and first 180 degrees y pulse of each echo train such that a phase angle of pi/2 develops between fat and the reference (water) line at echo maxima. The technique leads to single-acquisition fat suppression without the use of frequency-selective saturation pulses and concomitant loss of slices per TR. A Bloch equation analysis is used to identify two major mechanisms contributing to suppression of off-resonance spins such that w tau c = pi/2. Namely, the CPMG sequence becomes a CP sequence with no self-correction properties for imperfect 180 degrees pulses leading to enhanced signal decay, and the raw k-space data matrix become segmented into blocks alternately multiplied by +/- i, leading to signal dispersion following Fourier transformation.