DATA EXTRAPOLATION FOR TRUNCATION ARTIFACT REMOVAL

Clinicians typically obtain high‐resolution clinical MR images in an effort to avoid the truncation artifacts that often arise in Fourier transform reconstruction of limited data. A method for reducing these artifacts in MR images, at the reconstruction stage, would allow for reduced imaging times, through the collection of fewer phase encode steps and increased signal‐to‐noise ratios, through increased pixel size. The approach to reducing truncation artifacts in MR images is developed and a simple algorithm is presented which significantly reduces truncation artifacts in images with as few as 96 phase encode steps. The algorithm is compared with a more sophisticated method of reconstructing truncation‐free images and is shown to be equivalently effective. Three clinical examples are shown illustrating the Success of the method. © 1991 Academic Press, Inc. Copyright © 1991 Wiley‐Liss, Inc., A Wiley Company