Fast magnetic resonance imaging via frequency domain wavelet transforms

The technique is based on a proper design of the excitation profile. In particular, the excitation profile is chosen to be highly regular along its boundaries. It is shown that the free induction decay (FID) signals that result from such excitations decay much faster than those produced by traditional MRI approaches as long as the underlying magnetization and a number of its derivatives are continuous. The proposed technique exploits this fact together with an exact model of the slowly decaying components of the FID signal (those produced by discontinuities in the magnetization or its derivatives) to produce fast high-quality reconstructions of the underlying magnetization. Experimental results obtained with a 4-T whole body scanner are presented to demonstrate the viability of this approach.<>