By observing the fat-signal peak on the spectral display of a magnetic resonance (MR) imager while varying inversion time (TI), the authors determined the TI that produced the lowest fat peak for the best suppression of fat signal in subsequent short-TI inversion-recovery (STIR) MR imaging. In 25 volunteers who underwent imaging at multiple TIs, the TI that produced the lowest measured fat signal intensity was the same as that selected by means of TI tuning in 60% of cases and was within 5 msec in the remaining 40%.