CORRELATIVE AVERAGING FOR RADIAL MAGNETIC-RESONANCE-IMAGING

Although Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has faced a dramatic increas e in real-time capabilities over the last year, acceptable image quali ty still limits the actually achievable acquisition speed. This paper presents a motion-compensated noise filter that, on the basis of hiera rchical motion estimation and edge-preserving adaptive weighted averag ing, has been integrated into a segmented radial MR acquisition scheme . In several studies of moving joints, the proposed approach led to si gnificant reductions in the noise level without introducing motion blu r. The improved image quality would, in principle, allow more than dou ble the acquisition speed, retaining the original image quality.