Magnetic resonance-based method and system for determination of oxygen saturation in flowing blood

A system for measuring oxygen saturation in blood flowing in a vessel using magnetic resonance (MR), the system comprising:

• an MR acquisition device for acquiring non-transitory signals representing an MR image sequence of the vessel, the MR image sequence including a plurality of image data sets with different echo time (TE) encoding, and different Fourier velocity encoding (FVE), the FVE being obtained using different bipolar gradients having different amplitudes to encode respective different velocities for each TE, the FVE defining a velocity dimension in the MR image sequence;
• at least one processor for executing instructions configured to:
• receive the non-transitory signals from the MR acquisition device;
• for each TE, apply a Fourier transformation along the velocity dimension to measure a velocity distribution of non-transitory tissue signals in each voxel of the MR image sequence;
• measure non-transitory tissue signals indicative of flowing blood apart from non-transitory tissue signals indicative of static tissue, based on the velocity distribution;
• measure oxygen saturation in blood using only the non-transitory tissue signals indicative of flowing blood;
• and
• output non-transitory signals representative of the measured oxygen saturation to make available to a user or a device.

A non-transient computer readable medium for storing program instructions that, when executed by at least one processor causes the at least one processor to perform a method for measuring oxygen saturation in blood flowing in a vessel using magnetic resonance (MR), comprising:

• obtaining non-transitory signals representing an MR image sequence of the vessel from an MR acquisition device, the MR image sequence including a plurality of image data sets with different echo time (TE) encoding, and different Fourier velocity encoding (FVE), the FVE being obtained using different bipolar gradients having different amplitudes to encode respective different velocities for each TE, the FVE defining a velocity dimension in the MR image sequence;
• for each TE, applying a Fourier transformation along the velocity dimension to measure a velocity distribution of non-transitory tissue signals in each voxel of the MR image sequence;
• measuring non-transitory tissue signals indicative of flowing blood apart from non-transitory tissue signals indicative of static tissue, based on the velocity distribution;
• measuring oxygen saturation in blood using only the non-transitory tissue signals indicative of flowing blood;
• and
• making available non-transitory signals representative of the measured oxygen saturation.