Uti Limited Partnership

976076 Alberta Inc.

M Louis Lauzon

Hongmei Zhu

J Ross Mitchell

Richard Frayne

Robert Brown

Gregory S Mayer

The ability to examine the frequency content of a signal is critical in a variety of fields, and many techniques have been proposed to fill this need, including the Fourier and wavelet family of transforms. One of these, the S-transform, is a Fourier based transform that provides simultaneous time and frequency information similar to the wavelet transform but uses sinusoidal basis functions to produce true frequency and globally referenced phase measurements. It has been shown to be useful in several medical imaging applications but its use is limited due to high computational requirements of the original, continuous form. The described embodiments include a general framework for describing linear time-frequency transforms, using the Fourier, wavelet and S-transforms as examples. As an illustration of the utility of this formalism, a fast discrete S-transform algorithm is developed that has the same computational complexity as the fast Fourier transform.

Signal processing with fast S-transforms

The present invention relates to a method and system for enhancing resolution of a magnetic resonance image of an object. The method combines information from a plurality of low-resolution images with a Field Of View shifted by a distance less than a pixel width to create a synthesized image having substantially improved image quality. Information from the low-resolution images is merged and application of an aperture function enhances the SNR of the synthesized image resulting in synthesized images having a substantially higher spatial resolution as well as a substantially increased SNR. The method and system for enhancing resolution of a magnetic resonance image is highly beneficial for a MRI practitioner by substantially improving image quality, thus facilitating diagnostic methods such as texture analysis and disease specific tissue segmentation.

Synthetic aperture MRI

Growing community of inventors

Calgary, Canada

M Louis Lauzon