Multi-Echo Tricks Acquisition (META): a high spatio-temporal resolution multi-point Dixon sequence for dynamic contrast enhanced MRI

Introduction: Dynamic contrast enhanced MRI (DCEMRI) is widely used in clinical abdominal and pelvic MRI for tissue characterization and visualization of focal lesions. The technique affords adequate spatial resolution but temporal resolution is often insufficient for visualizing hypervascular tumors such as neuro-endocrine metastases and hepato-cellular carcinoma (HCC). Optimal timing of contrast arrival in the organ of interest is critical in capturing “arterial” phases and improving lesion conspicuity. Furthermore, traditional fat suppression methods perform suboptimally at 3T due to Bo and B1 inhomogeneities, causing non-uniform fat suppression across the image. We report a new DCEMRI technique called META (Multi-Echo Tricks Acquisition) that combines a multi-echo TRICKS [1] scan with a two-point Dixon fat-water reconstruction algorithm [2] to generate fat-only and water-only images at very high spatiotemporal resolution.