METHOD OF MAGNETIC RESONANCE RECONSTRUCTION IMAGING FROM PROJECTIONS USING PARTIAL DATA COLLECTED IN K-SPACE

The acquisition of radial lines in 2-D Fourier space (k-space) allows the realization of the extremely short echo times useful in the imaging of short-T.sub.2 species and flow using Magnetic Resonance (MR). The disadvantage of this imaging method, which is also known as projection reconstruction, is that in order to prevent aliasing at a given resolution, .pi. times as many excitations are required as the conventional 2-D Fourier transform or spin-warp acquisition. Disclosed is an acquisition and reconstruction method that reduces the required number of radial lines and excitations by using the properties that projections are real or have slowly varying phase and the at radial acquisition methods are oversampled at the center of k-space. This method preserves resolution while reducing imaging time at the expense of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This has been verified with both phantom and human subjects.