fatsuppression

Fat suppression is a technique used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to eliminate or reduce the signal from fat tissue. This technique is valuable in medical imaging because fat can obscure visualization of adjacent structures, particularly in musculoskeletal imaging, brain imaging, and abdominal examinations. There are several methods of fat suppression, including chemical shift selective fat saturation, short tau inversion recovery (STIR), and Dixon techniques. Chemical shift selective fat saturation uses specific radiofrequency pulses to selectively saturate fat protons before image acquisition. STIR exploits the different relaxation times of fat and water to suppress the fat signal. The Dixon technique uses the chemical shift between fat and water to create separate water-only and fat-only images. Fat suppression is particularly useful in detecting bone marrow edema, soft tissue tumors, and inflammatory conditions. It also improves contrast in post-contrast imaging by reducing the confounding effect of fat signal. However, fat suppression techniques can be sensitive to magnetic field inhomogeneities and motion artifacts, which may result in incomplete fat suppression or unwanted suppression of water signal.