Who said fat is bad? Skull-stripping benefits from additional fat image

Being a preliminary step for many clinical applications and analyses, accurate skull-stripping is a key challenge in MR brain imaging. One of its major difficulties arises from the contrast similarities at brain/non-brain tissue interfaces, in particular between grey matter (GM), veins, the dura mater and fat tissue. Multispectral imaging may help to mitigate this problem. Specifically, the acquisition of multiple echoes in a MP-RAGE sequence (MEMPR) as shown in the work of van der Kouwe et al. can be used for this purpose. Pursuing their approach, we combine MEMPR with the Dixon method to obtain an additional contrast depicting only the fat signal. This work investigates whether the thus generated additional information can improve the outcome of an unsupervised intensity-based skull-stripping algorithm.