Clinical usefulness of fat suppression technique for MR cholangiopancreatography (MRCP)

In order to obtain high quality of MRCP image, it is important to reduce the background signal intensity and increase the contrast of the pancreatobiliary ducts relative to surrounding fat tissue. The combination of long effective-TE and fat suppression technique including the short-TI inversion recovery and chemical-selective fat suppression enables to suppress the background signal intensity enough to obtain high quality MR cholangiopancreatogram. However, susceptibility artifacts from the metal, gastroduodenal gas, and vascular pulsation can be augmented by using the chemical-selective fat suppression technique, which may result in signal loss of the pancreatobiliary ducts. This potential diagnostic pitfalls can be avoided by interpreting the coronal source images obtained with long effective-TE and without fat suppression technique.