Oblique Reformatting Of Multislice MR Images For Improved Visualization Of Coronary Arteries
Nola M. Hylton, William S. Chung, Elias H. Botvinick, Nelson B. Schiller, Phillip E. Sheldon, Léon Kaufman · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1989
A technique for reformatting multislice magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data into arbitrary oblique planes has been developed and implemented on a DEC uVax system and allows flexible user interaction for the definition of the desired plane. The user identifies with a cursor features of interest on 2 or 3 different image levels to be combined in the resulting oblique image. The reformatted image can have arbitrary angulation and is created with a pixel dimension equivalent to the original data set. Resolution ranges from the original in-plane resolution to the slice thickness depending on angulation. This method has been applied to the particular problem of improving the presentation of coronary arteries on a conventional set of multislice spin echo cardiac images. In a study including 16 patients it was found that the visible length of coronary segments was increased on average by a factor of 2.