Phase-sensitive fat suppression steady-state free procession sequence with phase correction

Robust and fast fat suppression is a challenge in balanced steady-state free precession (SSFP) magnetic resonance imaging. Although single-acquisition phase-sensitive SSFP can provide fat-suppressed images in short scan time, phase errors, especially spatially-dependent phase shift, caused by a variety of factors may result in misplacement of fat and water voxels. In this paper, a novel phase correction algorithm was used to calibrate those phase errors during image reconstruction. This algorithm corrects phase by region growing, employing both the magnitude and the phase information of image pixels. Phantom and in vivo imagings were performed to validate the technique. As a result, excellent fat-suppressed images were acquired by using single-acquisition phase-sensitive SSFP with phase correction.