Inherent fat cancellation in complementary spatial modulation of magnetization

An efficient fat suppression method is presented for MR tagging with complementary spatial modulation of magnetization (CSPAMM). In this method, the complementary modulation is applied to the water content of the tissues, while in-phase modulation is applied to the fat content. Therefore, during image reconstruction, the subtraction of the acquired images increases the tagging contrast of the water while cancels the tagging lines of the fat. Compared with the existing fat suppression techniques, the proposed method allows imaging with higher temporal resolution and shorter echo-time without increasing the scan time. The feasibility of applying the method on 1.5 Tesla (T) and 3.0T scanners has been tested using MR phantom and human volunteers. © 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc.