Synopsis

Fat suppression can improve detection of lesions or reduce imaging artifacts, and therefore is often utilized in musculoskeletal (MSK) imaging. Ultrashort echo time MSK (UTE-MSK) imaging can also benefit from fat suppression to better visualize short T₂ tissues and lesions. However, the conventional fat suppression approaches such as two-point Dixon or fat-saturation may not be effective in UTE imaging due to the signal attenuation in short T₂ tissues. In this talk, we will review alternative approaches for fat suppression in UTE imaging, including single-point Dixon, UTE-IDEAL, single or dual IR based methods, multi-component analysis, and soft-hard pulse based water excitation.