Effectiveness of fat suppression using a water-selective binomial-pulse excitation in chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST) magnetic resonance imaging

Purpose The purpose of this study was to characterize the individual contribution of multiple fat peaks to the measured chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST) signal when using water-selective binomial-pulse excitation and to determine the effects of multiple fat peaks in the presence of B 0 inhomogeneity. Methods The excitation profiles of multiple binomial pulses were simulated. A CEST sequence with binomial-pulse excitation and modified point-resolved spectroscopy localization was then applied to the in vivo lumbar spinal vertebrae to determine the signal contributions of three distinct groups of lipid resonances. These confounding signal contributions were measured as a function of the irradiation frequency offset to determine the effect of the multi-peak nature of the fat signal on CEST imaging of exchange sites (at 1.0, 2.0 and 3.5 ppm) and robustness in the presence of B 0 inhomogeneity. Results Numerical simulations and in vivo experiments showed that water excitation (WE) using a 1-3-3-1 (WE-4) pulse provided the broadest signal suppression, which provided partial robustness against B 0 inhomogeneity effects. Confounding fat signal contributions to the CEST contrasts at 1.0, 2.0 and 3.5 ppm were unavoidable due to the multi-peak nature of the fat signal. However, these CEST sites only suffer from small lipid artifacts with ∆B 0 spanning roughly from − 50 to 50 Hz. Especially for the CEST site at 3.5 ppm, the lipid artifacts are smaller than 1% with ∆B 0 in this range. Conclusion In WE-4-based CEST magnetic resonance imaging, B 0 inhomogeneity is the limiting factor for fat suppression. The CEST sites at 1.0, 2.0 ppm and 3.5 ppm unavoidably suffer from lipid artifacts. However, when the ∆B 0 is confined to a limited range, these CEST sites are only affected by small lipid artifacts, which may be ignorable in some cases of clinical applications.