Improvement of multiple tissue contrast in magnetic resonance imaging by image combination

A method for combining multiple magnetic resonance images of the same anatomic slice to produce a single image which incorporates the favorable contrast features of each of the origin images is described. The target-point method is a general method which includes linear combination as a subset and is designed to deal with the clinical need to maximize the contrast-to-noise ratio between several pairs of tissues simultaneously. In a set of brain images the target-point method produces images with higher mutual contrast than the first principal component image, and in a simulation a target-point combination of several standard images produces a higher minimum contrast than an optimal acquisition using the same imaging time