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Biomedical subjects

B Madore

Publications and source records attributed to B Madore.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Velocity encoding using ghost artifacts.

Motion artifacts represent a significant limitation of MRI, and an ideal solution to that problem has proved elusive. However, in this paper, motion artifacts are not considered as the usual enemy and are not suppressed; on the contrary, they are deliberately created to encode flow information. In MRI, velocity is encoded readily into the phase of a pixel. However, if the pixel contains overlapping signals, the phase of one of these signals now has consequences on both the magnitude and phase of the resulting pixel. It is shown here that an overlap of information may be used to encode velocity both in the phase and in the magnitude of an image, making the velocity-encoding process faster. The overlap of information is obtained by superposing ghosting artifacts of different orders and information is retrieved about complex intensity and velocity in two dimensions using the equivalent of two images instead of the usual three images. The price to pay to do so is some loss of simplicity in the equations involved, an increase in reconstruction computing time requirements, and a factor of 4 decrease in signal-to-noise ratio in the velocity measurements.

Artifacts

A new way of averaging with applications to MRI.

Averaging is often used to increase the quality of an image degraded by noise or artifacts. A method is developed in which several degrees of freedom are introduced in the averaging process, this freedom making possible the choice of different weighting factors for different portions of the Fourier space. If a weighting factor is associated with each line of a magnetic resonance acquisition, we show that we obtain some freedom to eliminate motion artifacts. The process minimizes a quantity called the gradient energy over a region of interest in the image plane. A processed image is obtained from a mosaic of such regions of interest scanned over the whole image plane. The method is shown to yield greater motion artifact suppression in magnetic resonance images than that achieved with regular averaging. The main strength of the method is probably its ability to diminish the intensity of unstructured artifacts which are usually poorly managed by other postprocessing methods of artifacts suppression.

Biophysical Phenomena

Motion artifacts in fast spin-echo imaging.

The purpose of this work is to obtain a better understanding of motion artifacts in fast spin-echo imaging, in order to eventually identify efficient ways of suppressing them. To do so, the point spread function of a moving point was calculated for fast spin-echo imaging, and experimental data were acquired by imaging a moving liquid sphere with a diameter of 1.5 mm. The agreement of the experimental results with the calculated point spread function is shown to be excellent. It was found that motion artifacts in fast spin-echo imaging arise from the convolution of two distinct band patterns. One of these patterns may dominate the convolution, giving its own spacing to the resulting image. For other acquisition parameters, the convolution results in an intricate pattern that may appear to lack overall structure.

Algorithms