Noise reduction in MR echo planar image reconstruction

Author

Yan, Hong ; Mao, Jintong

Author_Institution

Sch. of Electr. Eng., Sydney Univ., NSW, Australia

Volume

10

Issue

2

fYear

1991

fDate

6/1/1991 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

148

Lastpage

153

Abstract

It is shown that the noise level in EPI (echo planar imaging) can increase very significantly if the final image is deconvolved to remove the ghost artifacts. This noise amplification is caused by divisions of small numbers, which scale the noise variance up. The scaling factor is a function of the frequency variable in the uniform sampling direction, and is small for low-frequency components and large for high-frequency components. A window function to provide an inverse scaling of data so that the noise scaling factor is canceled exactly is proposed. Since the signal energy is concentrated in the low-frequency range, it is not reduced significantly when windowing is applied. The window function is compared to the commonly used Hamming window and is shown to have good frequency response. The algorithm has been tested with computer simulations and has been verified to be able to raise the signal-to-noise ratio by 50% in the final image

Keywords

biomedical NMR; noise; patient diagnosis; Hamming window; NMR echo planar image reconstruction; computer simulations; frequency response; ghost artifacts; high-frequency components; low-frequency components; noise amplification; noise reduction; noise variance; scaling factor; signal energy; signal-to-noise ratio; window function; Computer simulation; Frequency response; Image reconstruction; Image sampling; Low-frequency noise; Noise cancellation; Noise level; Noise reduction; Signal to noise ratio; Testing;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Medical Imaging, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0278-0062

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/42.79472

Filename

79472