Spectrally-Presaturated Modulation (SPM): An efficient fat suppression technique for STEAM-based cardiac imaging sequences

Stimulated-echo acquisition mode (STEAM) is a key pulse sequences in MRI in general, and in cardiac imaging in particular. Fat suppression is an important feature in cardiac imaging to improve visualization and eliminate off-resonance and chemical-shift artifacts. Nevertheless, fat suppression comes at the expense of reduced temporal resolution and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The purpose of this study is to develop an efficient fat suppression method (Spectrally-Presaturated Modulation) for STEAM-based sequences to enable imaging with high temporal-resolution, high SNR, and no increase in scan time. The developed method is based on saturating the fat magnetization prior to applying STEAM modulation; therefore, only the water-content of the tissues is modulated by the sequence, resulting in fat-suppressed images without the need to run the fat suppression module during image acquisition. The potential significance of the proposed method is presented in two STEAM-based cardiac MRI applications: complementary spatial-modulation of magnetization (CSPAMM), and black-blood cine imaging. Phantom and in vivo experiments are conducted to evaluate the developed technique and compare it to the commonly implemented chemical-shift selective (CHESS) and water-excitation using spectral-spatial selective pulses (SSSP) fat suppression techniques. The results from the phantom and in vivo experiments show superior performance of the proposed method compared to the CHESS and SSSP techniques in terms of temporal resolution and SNR. In conclusion, the developed fat suppression technique results in enhanced image quality of STEAM-based images, especially in cardiac applications, where high temporal-resolution is imperative for accurate measurement of functional parameters and improved performance of image analysis algorithms.