Multi-Echo Steady-State MRI With Adapted Dixon Fat Suppression

The patent introduces an intermediary fat removal technique that processes the water-excited DESS images to eliminate residual fat signals. This intermediary step takes the partially fat-suppressed images and applies additional processing to achieve complete fat suppression while preserving the nerve signal enhancement provided by water excitation.

The patent modifies imaging parameters by acquiring multiple echoes with different timing and applying specific reconstruction algorithms. By changing the echo timing parameters and using multi-echo data, the system achieves both nerve signal enhancement and complete fat suppression that cannot be obtained with single-echo sequences alone.

The patent segments the fat removal process into distinct steps: generating multiple echo images, calculating phase differences between echoes, identifying fat-containing voxels based on phase criteria, and removing fat signals from each echo image separately. This segmentation makes the complex processing more manageable and systematic.

The patent performs preliminary actions by first generating all necessary echo images and calculating phase difference maps before actually removing fat signals. By pre-calculating the phase information and identifying fat locations in advance, the subsequent fat removal process becomes more efficient and less computationally intensive.