Feasibility of Water-Fat Separation for 2D Cardiac CINE Imaging with a Phase-Sensitive Approach on a 0.6T magnet

Motivation: Both fat and water appear bright in a bSSFP cine CMR. Distinguishing fat and water signals will provide additional information for diagnosis. However, fat-water separation becomes more difficult on a midfield scanner. Goal(s): To achieve fat-water separation without additional time cost on a 0.6T scanner. Approach: A phase sensitive algorithm was implemented to separate fat signals from a bSSFP EPI cine CMR scan. Results: The bSSFP EPI sequence enables shorter scan time and lower SAR than the conventional sequence. In addition, fat and water signals appear out-of-phase in the images and become separable with the phase sensitive algorithm after background phase correction. Impact: Water and fat signals become difficult to separate with midfield MRI scanners. The presented work utilizes an EPI scan to improve scan speed of a cine series while achieving fat and water separation with the phase information.