Improved fat suppression of cervical spine T2 weighted TSE images using enhanced slice-selective gradient reversal (enhanced LIPO)

Motivation: CHESS and its derivative SPIR hybrid techniques are nonuniform fat suppression occurs farther away from the isocenter of B0. These effects are common in the cervical spine and other cervical regions. Goal(s): We hypothesized that using LIPO-Only (LION) technique can be extended for T2-TSE with further optimization to increase the robustness of fat suppression. Approach: CR was calculated with ROIs placed on the spinal cord and vertebral intravital fat where fat suppression failure is most likely to occur. SNR were calculated with ROIs placed in spinal cord. Results: Combining T2-TSE with enhanced LION improves the robustness of fat suppression. Impact: These results suggested that enhanced LION T2-TSE improved the robustness of fat suppression and possible to maintain SNR equivalent to the conventional SPAIR T2-TSE. Further investigation is needed to improve the SNR with enhanced LIPO TSE.