A new strategy for spectroscopic imaging [magnetic resonance imaging]

A novel approach for reducing the imaging artifact in spectroscopic imaging or chemical shift imaging (CSI) is described. In order to reduce the ringing and maintain adequate SNR for the metabolites, the data points in high k-space are measured with one excitation or a few excitations, while those in the low k-space are sampled with many excitations. By virtue of this sampling scheme, the data contain more noise in the high spatial frequency region, and the direct Fourier transform reconstruction will generate a very noisy image. Therefore, a technique based on adaptive smoothing is developed for the reconstruction. From simulated and in vivo proton CSI experiments, it is concluded that the technique is robust and can be used for in vivo applications