Mr imaging with enhanced susceptibility contrast

Abstract

An object () in an examination volume of a MR device () is imaged with improved susceptibility weighted contrast. The imaging includes the steps of: a) generating at least two echo signals at different echo times by subjecting the object () to an imaging sequence of RF pulses and switched magnetic field gradients; b) acquiring the echo signals; c) repeating steps a) and b) for a plurality of phase encoding steps; d) reconstructing an intermediate MR image for each echo time from the acquired echo signals; and e) generating a susceptibility weighted MR image by computing, for each voxel of the susceptibility weighted MR image, a non-linear combination of the voxel values of the intermediate MR images at the respective image position. The non-linear combination emphasizes lower voxel magnitude values more than higher voxel magnitude values.