PCATMIP: Enhancing Signal Intensity in DW-MRI

Vinay Manjunath Pai¹, Stanislas Rapacchi², Peter Kellman¹, Pierre Croisille², Han Wen¹

Diffusion-weighted MRI (DWI) studies in body imaging generally lose signal intensity to physiological motion, which can adversely affect quantification and diagnosis. While averaging over multiple repetitions improves signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), it does not recover the attenuated signal intensity. We present PCATMIP, a combined Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Temporal Maximum Intensity Projection (TMIP) approach, as a means to resolving this issue. Numerical simulations and experimental results using porcine liver data show that PCATMIP yields higher signal intensity and less variability than averaging and higher SNR than TMIP, thus achieving an optimal balance between averaging and TMIP for processing DWI data.