Water/Fat separation with spatio-temporal EPI-based acquisition and reconstruction in body imaging

Water/fat separation is a reliable fat suppression technique. However, it is challenging in EPI-based imaging due to the large displacement along phase-encoding direction. We demonstrate the artifacts resulting from the poor-conditioning reconstruction of water/fat separation with EPI-based acquisition in body imaging. As a solution, unlike conventional multi-echo acquisition methods, our approach encodes the spectral components (water/fat) by acquiring and reconstructing the spatial and echo-time dimensions jointly. EPTI sampling trajectories and water/fat masking were used to improve the conditioning of the reconstruction. Phantom and in vivo (brain and breast) experiments were performed to show both results and limitations of this approach.