QUANTIFICATION AND IMPROVEMENT OF THE SIGNAL-TO-NOISE RATIO IN A MAGNETIC-RESONANCE IMAGE ACQUISITION PROCEDURE

A procedure is developed to quantify and improve the signal-to-noise r atio (SNR) of magnetic resonance images, The image SNR is quantified u sing the correlation function of two independent acquisitions of an im age, To test the performance of the quantification, SNR measurement da ta are fitted to theoretically expected curves. The proposed correlati on technique is also used to improve the SNR by estimating the amplitu de of the signal spectrum, The technique is applied to a set of MR ima ges, and its performance in terms of gain in SNR, contrast-to-noise ra tio (CNR), and resolution loss is compared to that of classical noise filters, The SNR as well as the CNR is improved significantly with min or loss of resolution, Finally, it is shown that the correlation techn ique can be implemented in a highly efficient way in almost any acquis ition procedure of a magnetic resonance imaging system. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Inc.