Parallel cardiac CINE imaging: application to Dixon water–fat separation and steadystate free precession. (abstr

Introduction: Balanced steady-state free precession (SSFP) is a rapid, short TR imaging technique well suited for cardiac imaging because of its high SNR and excellent blood-myocardial contrast (1,2). However, SSFP is limited by the fact that water and fat both appear bright and are difficult to distinguish, possibly obscuring underlying pathology. A recently described three-point “Dixon ” water-fat separation technique has been applied to multi-coil cardiac SSFP CINE imaging to generate separate water and fat CINE images (3). Unfortunately, the decomposition of water from fat requires a three-fold increase in the minimum scan time, compared to conventional SSFP CINE imaging. This increase in the minimum required data limits the achievable spatial and temporal resolution of this method. Despite the increas