What is the most effective way to decrease chemical shift artifacts?

Increasing the receive bandwidth is the most effective way to decrease chemical shift artifacts. Chemical shift artifacts occur due to the differences in resonance frequencies of protons in different chemical environments, which can result in misalignments between fat and water signals. By increasing the receive bandwidth, the frequency sampling range is expanded, capturing a wider spectrum of frequencies within a shorter time interval. This helps to minimize the misregistration of fat and water signals, thereby reducing the artifacts that may obscure diagnostic information.

Other methods, though potentially helpful in specific contexts, do not directly address the fundamental mechanism of chemical shift misalignment in the same way. Decreasing field strength would generally reduce the overall resolution and may not effectively eliminate artifacts. Increasing imaging time could allow for more data acquisition but does not inherently reduce the chemical shift effect itself, and using a lower frequency can have a similar impact as reducing field strength—potentially compromising image quality without adequately resolving the artifact issue. Thus, leveraging an increase in receive bandwidth is the most practical and efficient strategy to combat chemical shift artifacts in imaging.