Putting the fat and water protons to work for you: a demonstration through clinical cases of how fat-water separation techniques can benefit your body MRI practice.

OBJECTIVE: Separation methods exploit the different precessional frequencies of fat and water protons. They offer potential benefits to body MRI but are not routinely used in most practices. After a review of the technique, we highlight through cases promising applications of this technology, including using water-only series to obtain more robust fat-suppressed images, shortening MRI scanning protocol time, and achieving perfect coregistering of fat-suppressed and non-fat-suppressed images.
CONCLUSION: As technology has advanced, fat-water separation techniques have shown that they can be valuable tools for a body MRI practice, particularly when the presence or absence of fat, homogeneity of fat saturation, coregistration, or quantitative evaluation is critical.