Self-navigation using fat navigators for motion immune diffusion weighted-imaging via chemical-shift encoded multi-shot EPI

The presence of fat is a challenge in diffusion-weighted EPI. Recently, chemical-shift encoded approaches found interest, as a smart way of signal averaging, doing water/fat separation and diffusion phase navigation in the reconstruction. However, the dominant signal character of fat in diffusion could actually also be exploited as an advantage by forming a shot-specific fat navigator to track and correct for macroscopic in-plane motion, combined with a model-based self-navigated water/fat decomposition. This allows to correct for both physiological and macroscopic in-plane motion effects in DWI when estimating water and fat resolved images from chemical-shift encoded multi-shot EPI data.