Temporal Phase Correction of Quantitative T2 Data

Thorarin A. Bjarnason¹, Cheryl R. McCreary¹, Jeff F. Dunn¹, J Ross Mitchell¹

Magnetic resonance images are formed typically by taking the magnitude of reconstructed complex values. The magnitude operation changes the noise distribution from Gaussian to Rician. This operation causes artifacts in T₂ distributions calculated using the non-negative least squares algorithm. The artifacts caused by non-Gaussian noise distributions are becoming more relevant as scientists begin to identify tissue compartments with small intensity long T₂ decays. Here we propose, and examine, a temporal phase correction method allowing T₂ distributions to be created from complex quantitative T₂ data.