UTE-Dixon Fat-Water Imaging

Fat-water imaging is combined with techniques measuring short-T2 tissues, especially ultrashort echo time (UTE) techniques. Specifically, techniques combining both UTE and Dixon imaging are labeled as UTE-Dixon imaging techniques, which are applied both to suppress the fat signal in UTE acquisitions and to determine tissue electron density properties. This work aims to first explain the advantages of Dixon imaging for fat suppression in UTE acquisitions used in the depiction of tissues with short T2s. The most important technical aspects of UTE-Dixon imaging are then reviewed, including the most frequently employed data acquisition techniques and previously reported water-fat separation approaches. The most important up-to-date applications of UTE-Dixon imaging are finally described with a particular focus on the determination of positron emission tomography (PET) attenuation correction in PET-magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and on the imaging of short-T2 tissues in musculoskeletal radiology.