Chemical-shift imaging utilizing the positional shifts along the readout gradient direction

In this work, we describe a method that uses the linear phase acquired duri ng the readout period due to chemical shift to generate individual magnetic resonance (MR) images of chemically shifted species. The method utilizes s ets of Fourier (or k-space) data acquired with different directions of the readout gradient and a postprocessing algorithm to generate chemical shift images. The methodology is developed for both Cartesian data acquisition an d for radial data acquisition. The method is presented here for two chemica lly shifted species but it can be extended to more species. In this work, w e present the theory, show the results in phantoms and in human images, and discuss the artifacts and signal-to-noise ratio of the images obtained wit h the technique.