RARE two‐point Dixon with dual bandwidths

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Abstract
Purpose: To investigate the impact of dual readout bandwidths (dBW) in a dual echo fat/water acquisition and describe a dBW‐rapid acquisition relaxation enhanced, or turbo spin echo sequence where the concept is used to improve SNR by removing dead times between refocusing pulses and avoiding redundant Chemical‐shift encoded.Methods: Cramér‐Rao bounds and Monte Carlo simulations were used to investigate a two‐point fat/water model where the difference in bandwidths is incorporated. In vivo images were acquired at 1.5 and 3 T with the dBW‐rapid acquisition relaxation enhanced, or turbo spin echo sequence. Typical bandwidth ratios were 1:2. SNR was compared with a single bandwidth sequence under identical scan parameters at 3T.Results: Monte Carlo simulations and Cramér‐Rao analysis demonstrate that number of signal averages can be improved with dual bandwidths compared to conventional single bandwidth acquisitions. The dBW‐rapid acquisition relaxation enhanced, or turbo spin echo sequence can acquire images with high readout resolutions with well‐conditioned sampling. An SNR improvement of 52% was measured, in line with the theoretical gain of 54%.Conclusions: The proposed dBW‐rapid acquisition relaxation enhanced, or turbo spin echo sequence is a highly SNR‐efficient two‐point rapid acquisition relaxation enhanced, or turbo spin echo sequence without dead times, and can acquire images at higher resolutions than current vendor‐supplied alternatives.

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