Technical Note: Interleaved bipolar acquisition and low‐rank reconstruction for water–fat separation in MRI

Purpose To acquire interleaved bipolar data and reconstruct the full data using low‐rank property for water–fat separation. Methods Bipolar acquisition suffers from issues related to gradient switching, the opposite gradient polarities, and other system imperfections, which prevent accurate water–fat separation. In this study, an interleaved bipolar acquisition scheme and a low‐rank reconstruction method were proposed to reduce issues from the bipolar gradients while achieving a short imaging time. The proposed interleaved bipolar acquisition scheme collects echo‐time signals from both gradient polarities; however, the sequence increases the imaging time. To reduce the imaging time, the signals were subsampled at every dimension of k‐space. The low‐rank property of the bipolar acquisition was defined and exploited to estimate the full data from the acquired subsampled data. To eliminate the bipolar issues, in the proposed method, the water–fat separation was performed separately for each gradient polarity, and the results for the positive and negative gradient polarities were combined after the water–fat separation. Results A phantom study and in vivo experiments were conducted on a 3T Siemens Verio system. The results for the proposed method were compared with the results of the fully sampled interleaved bipolar acquisition and the Soliman's method, which was the previous water–fat separation approach for reducing the issues of bipolar gradients and accelerating the interleaved bipolar acquisition. The proposed method provided accurate water and fat images without the issues of bipolar gradients and demonstrated a better performance compared with the results of the previous methods. Conclusions The water–fat separation using the bipolar acquisition has several benefits including a short echo‐spacing time. However, it suffers from bipolar‐gradient issues such as strong gradient switching, system imperfection, and eddy current effects. This study demonstrated that accurate water–fat separated images can be obtained using the proposed interleaved bipolar acquisition and low‐rank reconstruction by using the benefits of the bipolar acquisition while reducing the bipolar‐gradient issues with a short imaging time.