Zhaolin Chen1, Leigh A. Johnston2,
Gary F. Egan3
1Florey Neuroscience Institutes,
Carlton, VIC, Australia; 2Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
University of Melbourne; 3Centre for Neuroscience, University of
Melbourne
Recent
developments in MR phase imaging enable analyses of MR signals in the complex
domain. However, in clinical diagnoses and anatomical studies, it is
necessary to objectively map complex MR signals to a one-dimensional signal
for visualisation. The Susceptibility Weighted Imaging (SWI) method uses the
phase image to calculate a phase mask that is multiplied with the magnitude
image to enhance the contrast caused by tissue susceptibility. SWI has
demonstrated great advantage in contrast enhancement for various
applications. In this work, we introduce a new method called Maximum Contrast
Image (MCI) to further improve the image contrast from complex MR signals.
Enhanced image contrasts obtained with the new method have been demonstrated
using a 3T dataset of a cortical brain section. Furthermore, in contrast to
the nonlinear operation in SWI, the MCI method uses a linear operation, which
permits meaningful quantification of the MCI signals.
Keywords