Putting the fat and water protons to work for you: a demonstration through clinical cases of how fat-water separation techniques can benefit your body MRI practice.

Abstract

Separation methods exploit the different precessional frequencies of fat and water protons. They offer potential benefits to body MRI but are not routinely used in most practices. After a review of the technique, we highlight through cases promising applications of this technology, including using water-only series to obtain more robust fat-suppressed images, shortening MRI scanning protocol time, and achieving perfect coregistering of fat-suppressed and non-fat-suppressed images. As technology has advanced, fat-water separation techniques have shown that they can be valuable tools for a body MRI practice, particularly when the presence or absence of fat, homogeneity of fat saturation, coregistration, or quantitative evaluation is critical.