A subjective and objective comparison of tissue contrast and imaging artifacts present in routine spin echoes and in iterative decomposition of asymmetric spin echoes for soft tissue neck MRI.

Objective: FSE sequences play key roles in neck MRI despite the susceptibility issues in neck region. Iterative decomposition of asymmetric echoes (IDEAL, GE) is a promising method that separates fat and water images resulting in high SNR and improved fat suppression. We tested how neck tissue contrasts, image artifacts and fat separation as opposed to fat suppression in terms of image quality compare between routine and IDEAL FSE.