Chou-Ming Cheng1,
2, Hsiao-Wen Chung1, Hing-Chiu Chang3, 4,
Tzu-Chen Yeh5, 6, Jen-Chuen Hsieh7, 8,
Shing-Jong Lin7, Chao-Ying Wang9
1Graduate
Institute of Biomedical Electronics and Bioinformatics, National Taiwan
University , New Taipei City, Taiwan, Taiwan; 2Department of Medical
Research and Education, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan; 3Graduate
Institute of Biomedical Electronics and Bioinformatics, National Taiwan
University, New Taipei City, Taiwan, Taiwan; 4GE Healthcare,
Global Applied Science Laboratory, Taipei, Taiwan; 5Department of
Radiology, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan, Taiwan; 6Institute
of Brain Science, National Yang-Ming
University, Taipei, Taiwan, Taiwan; 7Department of Medical
Research and Education, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan,
Taiwan; 8Institute of Brain Science, National Yang-Ming
University, Taipei, Taiwan, Taiwan; 9Department of Radiology,
Tri-Service General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan, Taiwan
Susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI) and susceptibility weighted angiography (SWAN) helps delineating hemorrhage and veins by incorporating phase information from long echo time (TE) signals and performing multiple echoes averaged, respectively. Since the averaging operation with signals from early echoes inevitably results in a dilution of T2* weighting, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvements and loss in contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) present an obvious trade-off. In this research, an adaptive averaging scheme for multi-echo SWI is proposed, with weights of echoes adjusted according to the phase value of each voxel to achieve SNR improvements without sacrificing CNR.