Spectrally resolved fully phase‐encoded three‐dimensional fast spin‐echo imaging

Abstract

To develop and test the feasibility of a spectrally resolved fully phase-encoded (SR-FPE) three-dimensional fast spin-echo technique and to demonstrate its application for distortion-free imaging near metal and chemical species separation. In separate scans at 1.5 T, a hip prosthesis phantom and a sphere filled with gadolinium solution were imaged with SR-FPE and compared to conventional three-dimensional-fast spin-echo. Spectral modeling was performed on the SR-FPE data to generate the following parametric maps: species-specific signal (ρspecies), B0 field inhomogeneity, and R*2. The prosthesis phantom was also scanned using a 16-channel coil at 1.5 T. The fully sampled k-space data were retrospectively undersampled to demonstrate the feasibility of parallel imaging acceleration in all three phase-encoding directions, in combination with corner-cutting and half-Fourier sampling. Finally, SR-FPE was performed with an acetone/water/oil phantom to test chemical species separation. High quality distortion-free images and parametric maps were generated from SR-FPE. A 4 h SR-FPE scan was retrospectively accelerated to 12 min while preserving spectral information and 7.5 min without preserving spectral data. Chemical species separation was demonstrated in the acetone/water/oil phantom. This work demonstrates the feasibility of SR-FPE to perform chemical species separation and spectrally resolved imaging near metal without distortion, in scan times appropriate for the clinical setting.