Whole-Body Continuously Moving Table Fat-Water MRI with Dynamic B0 Shimming at 3 Tesla

Purpose: The purpose of this work was to develop a rapid and robust whole-body fat-water MRI (FWMRI) method using a continuously moving table (CMT) with dynamic field corrections at 3 Tesla. Methods: CMT FWMRI was developed at 3 Tesla with a multiecho golden angle (GA) radial trajectory and dynamic B-0 field shimming. Whole-body imaging was performed with 4 echoes and superior-inferior coverage of 1.8 meters without shims in 90 s. 716 axial images were reconstructed with GA profile binning followed by B-0 field map generation using fast three-point seeded region growing fat-water separation and slice-specific 0th and 1st order shim calculation. Slice-specific shims were applied dynamically in a repeated CMT FWMRI scan in the same session. The resulting images were evaluated for field homogeneity improvements and quality of fat-water separation with a whole-image energy optimized algorithm. Results: GA sampling allowed high quality whole-body FWMRI from multiecho CMT data. Dynamic B-0 shimming greatly improved field homogeneity in the body and produced high quality water and fat only images as well as fat signal fraction and R-2* relaxivity maps. Conclusion: A rapid and robust technique for whole-body fat-water quantification has been developed with CMT MRI with dynamic B-0 field correction. (C) 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.