ABSTRACT
<p><b>OBJECTIVE</b>An improved water-fat separation method based on region-growing was proposed for use in regions with low signal-noise ratio (SNR).</p><p><b>METHODS</b>Region-growing method was applied to 4 sub-images acquired by a down- sampling operation on the acquired phasor maps. The spatial smoothing constraint was exploited to calculate 4 error phasor maps to construct the final smooth error phasor map, which was used in two-point Dixon technique for water-fat separation.</p><p><b>RESULTS</b>The simulation experiment showed that the proposed method produced smaller errors, and for clinical images of the knees, abdomen and lower limbs, the proposed method achieved accurate water-fat separations.</p><p><b>CONCLUSION</b>The proposed method is more robust and reliable than the original global region-growing algorithm, and serves as a promising water-fat separation method for clinical applications.</p>