Christine Gnahm1, Michael Bock1, 2, Wolfhard Semmler1, Armin M. Nagel1
1Dept. of Medical Physics in Radiology, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany; 2Radiology - Medical Physics, University Hospital Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
The image quality of 23Na-MRI can be substantially improved by incorporating basic anatomical information from 1H-MRI into the reconstruction. An iterative reconstruction algorithm is presented that combines a total variation (TV) constraint with object boundary information derived from 1H data. The algorithm is evaluated on phantom data and compared to both conventional gridding and TV-regularized iterative reconstruction. With the 1H constraint, an up to 150% increase in SNR over gridding reconstruction is seen, and spatial resolution is preserved better than with a TV-constraint alone. Furthermore, the image contrast is maintained which is also demonstrated in brain images of a volunteer.
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