METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PROCESSING MRI DATA ACQUIRED WITH A PLURALITY OF COILS USING DIXON TECHNIQUES

Three MRI acquisitions are performed to acquire data from which separate water and fat images may be reconstructed using a three-point Dixon technique. The NMR data is acquired with a phased array coil having four separate coil elements. Low resolution images are reconstructed from the acquired NMR data sets and used to calculate phase corrections which are used to correct reconstructed high resolution images. The corrected high resolution images are processed using the Dixon technique to produce fat and water images for each coil element which are combined into a single fat and a single water image.