TEMPORAL RESOLUTION IMPROVEMENT IN DYNAMIC IMAGING

In some dynamic imaging applications, only a fraction, 1/n, of the fie ld of view (FOV) may show considerable change during the motion cycle. A method is presented that improves the temporal resolution for a dyn amic region by a factor, n, while maintaining spatial resolution at a cost of root n signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Temporal resolution is imp roved, or alternatively, total imaging time is reduced by reducing the number of phase encodes acquired for each temporal frame by 1/n. To e liminate aliasing, a representation of the signal from the static oute r portion of the FOV is constructed using all the raw data. The k-spac e data derived from this representation is subtracted from the origina l data sets, and the differences correspond to the dynamic portion of the FOV. Improved resolution results are presented in phantom studies, and in vivo phase contrast quantitative flow imaging.