A digital-electronic video-rate reconstruction system for magnetic resonance imaging

Abstract

A digital-electronic video-rate reconstruction system for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has been designed to first order. The maturation of ultra-fast acquisition techniques in MRI has produced the need for a reconstruction system that will enable dynamic processes to be viewed on-line. Conventional reconstruction hardware is not configured for real-time reconstruction and previous developments are limited in accuracy and flexibility. The real-time reconstruction system presented here consists of three main subsystems. A digitizer interfaces with an MR scanner to digitize data matrices of resolutions up to 256 x 256 at arbitrary rates up to video rates. A Fourier processor performs either 2D Fourier transformation or projection filtering on the digitized data at video-rates. A backprojector performs the backprojection operation on filtered-projection data at video-rates. The complete system would be able to reconstruct data acquired from nearly any acquisition technique. True real-time MRI is then possible.