Dixon imaging techniques derive chemical shift-separated water and fat images, enabling the quantification of fat content and forming an alternative to fat suppression. Whole-body Dixon imaging is of interest in studies of obesity and the metabolic syndrome, and possibly in oncology. A three-point Dixon method is proposed where two solutions are found analytically in each voxel. The true solution is identified by a multiseed three-dimensional region-growing scheme with a dynamic path, allowing confident regions to be solved before unconfident regions, such as background noise. 2 pi-Phase unwrapping is not required. Whole-body datasets (256 x 184 x 252 voxels) were collected from 39 subjects (body mass index 19.8-45.4 kg/m(2)), in a mean scan time of 5 min 15 sec. Water and fat images were reconstructed offline, using the proposed method and two reference methods. The resulting images were subjectively graded on a four-grade scale by two radiologists, blinded to the method used. The proposed method was found superior to the reference methods. It exclusively received the two highest grades, implying that only mild reconstruction failures were found. The computation time for a whole-body dataset was 1 min 51.5 sec +/- 3.0 sec. It was concluded that whole-body water and fat imaging is feasible even for obese subjects, using the proposed method.

The two-point Dixon method is a proton chemical shift imaging technique that produces separated water-only and fat-only images from a dual-echo acquisition. It is shown how this can be achieved without the usual constraints on the echo times. A signal model considering spectral broadening of the fat peak is proposed for improved water/fat separation. Phase errors, mostly due to static field inhomogeneity, must be removed prior to least-squares estimation of water and fat. To resolve ambiguity of the phase errors, a corresponding global optimization problem is formulated and solved using a message-passing algorithm. It is shown that the noise in the water and fat estimates matches the Cramér-Rao bounds, and feasibility is demonstrated for in vivo abdominal breath-hold imaging. The water-only images were found to offer superior fat suppression compared with conventional spectrally fat suppressed images.

The chemical shift of water and fat resonances in proton MRI allows separation of water and fat signal from chemical shift encoded data. This work describes an automatic method that produces separate water and fat images as well as quantitative maps of fat signal fraction and T₂^* from complex multi-echo gradient recalled datasets. Accurate water and fat separation is challenging due to signal ambiguity at the voxel level. Whole-image optimization can resolve this ambiguity, but might be computationally demanding, especially for three-dimensional (3D) data. In this work, periodicity of the model fit residual as a function of the off-resonance was utilized to modify a previously proposed formulation of the problem. This gives a smaller solution space and allows rapid optimization. Feasibility and accurate separation of water and fat signal was demonstrated in breathhold 3D liver imaging of ten volunteer subjects, with both acquisition and reconstruction times below 20 seconds.

Knowledge about the triglyceride (fat) ¹H spectrum enables quantitative determination of several triglyceride characteristics. This work describes a model-based chemical shift imaging method that separates water and fat signal and provides maps of three triglyceride quantities: fatty acid carbon chain length (CL), number of double bond pairs (ndb), and number of methylene-interrupted double bonds (nmidb). The method was validated by imaging a phantom containing ten different oils using 1.5 T and 3.0 T clinical scanners, with gas-liquid chromatography (GLC) as reference. Repeated acquisitions demonstrated high reproducibility of the method. Statistical tests of correlation and linear regression were performed to examine the accuracy of the method. Significant correlation was found at both field strengths for all three quantities, and high correlation (r² > 0.96) was found for measuring ndb and nmidb. Feasibility of the method for in vivo imaging of the thigh was demonstrated at both field strengths. The estimates of ndb and nmidb in subcutaneous adipose tisse were in agreement with literature values, while CL appears overestimated. The method has potential use in large-scale cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of triglyceride composition, and its relation to diet and various diseases.