WATER-FAT SEPARATION FOR FAST SPIN ECHO IMAGING IN AN INHOMOGENEOUS FIELD WITH PROGRESSIVE ENCODING

A method to separate two chemically-shifted components of water (w) and fat (f) signals by: (i) estimating the field inhomogeneity β through a treatment of the residuals of the Moore-Penrose solution of the following equations: cos(αnβ)*w+cos [αn(1+β)]*f=real (In) and sin(αnβ)*w+sin [αn(1+β)]*f=imaginary (In), and (ii) using the estimated β to determine the resulting solution for w and f from the original input signals In.