The application of relaxation labelling process to NMR flow image analysis

The widespread prevalence of atherosclerotic vascular disease has given rise to the need for an accurate and noninvasive method for assessing the connection between in vivo blood flow and the localized genesis and development of cardiovascular diseases. The ability to make these measurements totally non-invasive has obvious advantages in terms of the reduction of patient trauma and the low cost of the operating procedure. Another important role of blood flow measurement is the ability to study in detail the physiology of blood flow in the normal human as well as the breakdown of this physiology with various cardiovascular diseases. This has motivated research into applying Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) imaging techniques to the measurement of in vivo blood flow. The authors discuss the application of image analysis techniques to the automatic determination of the flow boundaries and the elimination of noise in NMR velocity images. The work is mainly directed towards NMR flow images, but the idea is applicable to areas where multiple images are used to represent different components of the distribution of high dimensional signals