A general formalism for the manipulation of multiple-echo data sets, and application to chemical shift editing

A general data processing formalism is presented which can be applied to the signal intensities of successive echoes of a multiple-echo data set in order to null those species for which the signal decay function is exponential. If asymmetric echo times are introduced into the multiple-echo sequence then chemical shift images akin to those obtained from the magnitude Dixon method can be obtained in half the data acquisition time.