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Abstract #4563

A Pixel is an Artifact: On the Necessity of Zero-Filling in Fourier Imaging

Xiaolu Zhu1, Boguslaw Tomanek1, Jonathan Sharp1

1Institute for Biodiagnostics (West), National Research Council of Canada, Calgary, AB, Canada


Pixels visible as small square patches of uniform intensity do not represent object structures and are therefore artifacts. To quantitatively evaluate this we designed a Fourier-based method to decompose a pixelated visual scene into two parts: one representing the information in the original MRI k-space data, and the other the visible structure related to pixelized patchwork display. Results show that pixelized patchwork displays: A) attenuate actual high spatial frequency content (because patchwork display enforces image uniformity within each patch); and B) introduce artifactual high spatial frequencies (the patch edges). The solution is to zero-fill until individual pixels become invisible.