Spiral cardiac cine imaging with water/fat separation

Motivation: Water/fat separation can be helpful to better distinguish adipose tissue, blood and myocardium in a cardiac cine series. However, inclusion of a multi-echo acquisition in the conventional bSSFP sequence can introduce artifacts and reduce temporal efficiency. Goal(s): To develop a fast and robust water/fat separation method for time-resolved cardiac cine imaging. Approach: A spoiled gradient echo sequence with spiral acquisition is proposed to perform the cine acquisition with retrospectively cardiac gating. Results: The image from the proposed method has shorter scan time, lower artifact level and lower RF deposition compared to a multi-echo bSSFP sequence. Impact: We demonstrate the feasibility of spiral cardiac cine imaging with water/fat separation, enabling faster scanning while preserving adequate contrast among adipose tissue, blood and myocardium. This sequence also has low RF deposition with much lower SAR level for the patient.