High resolution, swap free, and motion compensated water/fat separation in free-breathing pediatric T1-weighted abdominal MRI

T1-weighted GRE sequence with Dixon technique for water/fat separation is a routine component of abdominal MRI to detect lesions and characterize hemorrhage/fat content. The limitations of the routine free-breathing T1-weighted pediatric abdominal MRI and water/fat separation includes low-resolution to achieve high pixel-bandwidth and minimize chemical shift, respiratory motion blurring (despite radial acquisition) that degrades image sharpness, water/fat swapping, and off-resonance fat blurring due to multi-peak nature of fat spectrum. We have assessed a novel image acquisition and reconstruction pipeline based on 3-point Dixon method, multi-peak fat model, and residual motion correction to address all the limitations of the current practice.