Adaptive data differentiation and selection from multi-coil receiver to reduce artifacts in reconstruction

A method of automatically determining a subset of acquired data from a field-of-view of a receiver assembly having a number of coils comprising the steps of:

• acquiring a number of images from a plurality of coils of an image field-of-view (FOV);
• determining an image intensity for each of the number of images;
• projecting the image intensity of each image onto a virtual axis of the plurality coils to create an intensity profile map;
• and
• selecting a subset of images of the number of images acquired based on the intensity profile map.

An MRI apparatus to reduce artifacts in reconstructed images comprising:

• a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system having a plurality of coils positioned about a bore of a magnet to impress a polarizing magnetic field and an RF transceiver system and an RF switch controlled by a pulse module to transmit and receive RF signals to and from a multi-coil RF coil assembly to acquire MR images;
• and
• a computer programmed to:
• acquire an MR image from each coil of the multi-coil RF coil assembly across an image FOV;
• determine an intensity value for each MR image;
• differentiate the MR images acquired from each coil based on the intensity values to discard any MR image having excess data acquired outside the image FOV;
• and
• reconstruct a final image by combining a remaining number of MR images.

A computer program having a set of instructions that when executed by a computer causes the computer to:

• acquire a set of imaging data including a number of data frames;
• determine an intensity value for each data frame;
• determine an intensity index from each intensity value;
• form a reconstruction data set that only includes the data frames having an intensity value exceeding the intensity index;
• and
• reconstruct an image from the reconstruction data set.

An MR scanner comprising:

• means for acquiring an image data set from each of a plurality of receiver coils;
• means for determining an index gauge for each image data set;
• means for comparing the index gauges;
• means for removing any image data set having an index gauge demonstrating a spatial relationship between the given receiver coil and the desired FOV that is less than optimal based on the comparison;
• and
• means for reconstructing an image from a remaining imaging data sets.