Fast Spiral two-point Dixon technique using block regional off-resonance correction

Abstract

The Spiral two-point Dixon (Spiral 2PD) technique has recently been proposed as a method for unambiguous water-fat decomposition in spiral imaging. It also corrects for off-resonance blurring artifacts using only two data sets. In the Spiral 2PD technique, several predetermined off-resonance frequencies are tested to both separate water and fat signals and deblur the decomposed images. Unfortunately, the algorithm is computationally quite intensive since the range of tested frequencies must be set sufficiently large to span the full range of anticipated Bo variation over the scanned objects. The block regional off-resonance correction (BRORC) algorithm corrects for off-resonance blurring artifacts block by block through the reconstructed image and usually provides several times higher computational efficiency than the conventional frequency-segmented off-resonance correction algorithm. This work shows that both water-fat decomposition and blurring artifact correction can be performed block by block using two spiral images with different TEs and that this new technique (BRORC-Spiral2PD technique) significantly improves the computational efficiency of other Spiral 2PD algorithms, opening new opportunities for spiral imaging. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc.