Patent ID: 7646198

Claim:
An apparatus to produce MRI images with chemical species suppression for a scanned object region, comprising: a MRI scanner for obtaining images of a predetermined volume a controller configured to control operation of the scanner to acquire images using a modified Dixon technique wherein data acquisition for the modified Dixon technique is performed over an entire read gradient of a gradient echo pulse sequence performed by the scanner; where the data acquisition for the modified Dixon technique acquires data over a dephase lobe, a readout lobe and a rephase lobe of the read gradient, where data acquired during the dephase and rephase lobes are combined to form a first Dixon MRI data set and data acquired during the readout lobe is used to form a second Dixon MRI data set; a processing system to process the first Dixon MRI data set and the second Dixon MRI data set using a Dixon reconstruction technique to create a first chemical species image data set and a second chemical species image data set, and an output device for display of a first chemical species image and a second chemical species image, based, at least in part, on the first and second chemical species image data sets.