Addressing Concomitant Gradient Phase Errors in Time-Interleaved Chemical Shift-Encoded MRI Fat Fraction and R2* Mapping with a Pass-Specific Phase Fitting Method

PURPOSE: Concomitant gradients induce phase errors that increase quadratically with distance from isocenter. This work proposes a complex-based fitting method that addresses concomitant gradient phase errors in chemical-shift-encoded (CSE) MRI estimation of proton density fat fraction (PDFF) and R2* through joint estimation of pass-specific phase terms. This method is applicable to time-interleaved multi-echo gradient-echo acquisitions (i.e., multi-pass acquisitions) and does not require prior knowledge of gradient waveforms, typically needed to address concomitant gradient phase errors. THEORY AND METHODS: A CSE-MRI spoiled gradient echo signal model, with pass-specific phase terms, is introduced for non-linear least squares estimation of PDFF and R2* in the presence of concomitant gradient phase errors. Cramér-Rao lower bound analysis was used to determine noise performance tradeoffs of the proposed fitting method, which was then validated in both phantom and in vivo experiments. RESULTS: The proposed fitting method removed PDFF and R2* estimation errors up to 12% and 10s(−1), respectively, at ±12cm off isocenter (S/I) in a water phantom. In healthy volunteers, PDFF and R2* bias was reduced by ~10% (12cm off-isocenter) and ~30s(−1) (16cm off-isocenter), respectively. An evaluation in 29 clinical liver datasets demonstrated reduced PDFF bias and variability (8.4% improvement in the coefficient of variation), even with the imaging volume centered at isocenter. CONCLUSION: Concomitant-gradient-induced phase errors in multi-pass CSE-MRI acquisitions can result in PDFF and R2* estimation biases away from isocenter. The proposed fitting method enables accurate PDFF and R2* quantification in the presence of concomitant gradient phase errors without knowledge of imaging gradient waveforms.