Line-Integral Projection Reconstruction (LPR) with Slice Encoding Techniques: Multislice Regional Imaging in NMR Tomography

Abstract

Line-integral projection reconstruction (LPR) in NMR imaging was found to be useful and has several advantages such as the imaging capability of objects having short T2 and compensation of phase fluctuations arising from the system instability. Although single slice LPR is found to be inefficient and poor in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the multislice encoded LPR method is of interest since it has a high SNR and also the capability of selected regional volume or multislice imaging. The latter, i.e., regional volume imaging capability, is a unique property of NMR imaging and offers a variety of imaging capabilities such as simultaneous multislice imaging of sagittal, transaxial, or coronal views. In this paper, we have investigated two basic forms of the multislice encoded imaging methods using LPR, i.e., Fourier and Hadamard-like encoding matrices. Applications of the methods to the experimented NMR imaging show good agreement with predicted behavior.