Homodyne reconstruction and IDEAL water-fat decomposition

Multipoint water–fat separation methods have received renewed interest because they provide uniform separation of water and fat despite the presence of B0 and B1 field inhomogeneities. Unfortunately, full‐resolution reconstruction of partial k‐space acquisitions has been incompatible with these methods. Conventional homodyne reconstruction and related algorithms are commonly used to reconstruct partial k‐space data sets by exploiting the Hermitian symmetry of k‐space in order to maximize the spatial resolution of the image. In doing so, however, all phase information of the image is lost. The phase information of complex source images used in a water–fat separation acquisition is necessary to decompose water from fat. In this work, homodyne imaging is combined with the IDEAL (iterative decomposition of water and fat with echo asymmetry and least squares estimation) method to reconstruct full resolution water and fat images free of blurring. This method is extended to multicoil steady‐state free precession and fast spin‐echo applications and examples are shown. Magn Reson Med, 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.