TARGET-POINT COMBINATION OF MR IMAGES

A method is described for combining multiple magnetic resonance images of the same anatomic slice to produce a single image which incorporates the favorable contrast features of each of the original images. The target‐point method is a general method that includes linear combination as a subset and is designed to deal with the clinical need to maximize the contrast‐to‐noise ratio between several pairs of tissues simultaneously. Although it is intrinsically a nonlinear method, noise propagates approximately uniformly into the combined image. In examples of brain images the target‐point method produced images with higher mutual contrast than the first principal component weighted sum image. © 1991 Academic Press. Inc. Copyright © 1991 Wiley‐Liss, Inc., A Wiley Company