Single point Dixon for water-fat separation in musculoskeletal TSE imaging

Motivation: TSE Dixon imaging is highly desired in clinical musculoskeletal imaging for its versatile contrasts. However, conventional Dixon imaging needs at least two different echo times, resulting in prolonged scan time. Goal(s): To develop a single point Dixon imaging technique for TSE acquisition (sTSE-Dixon) that provide fat-separated, water-separated and in phase images from a single echo time acquisition. Approach: Shifted single echo TSE acquisition was combined with smoothness-constrained non-linear inverse water fat problem. Results: High quality water-separated, fat-separated and in phase images comparable to those obtained with conventional two-point Dixon were achieved from a single echo time shifted TSE acquisition. Impact: In this work, a single echo time TSE sequence can deliver three image sets that are of great clinical need, including fat-separated images (comparable to standard T1-weighted), water-separated images (comparable to STIR), in-phase images (comparable to standard T2-weighted)