T₂ deconvolution in MR imaging and NMR spectroscopy

Both MR imaging and NMR spectroscopy can suffer from a loss of resolutions when T₂ is short compared to the total sampling time T_s due to the exponential decay during sampling. In practice, a relatively long T_s may be chosen so that the truncation artifacts are minimized and the S N is maximized. Therefore T₂ deconvolution is desirable in the presence of short T₂ components. Resolution enhancement using the conventional apodization filter method is usually associated with a loss of S N and other artifacts such as baseline shift and lineshape distortion. Maximum entropy methods have not proven to be adequate for exact T₂ deconvolution when T₂ is position or frequency dependent. Other approaches include linear prediction schemes to extract the spectral locations and T₂ values. In this paper, a generalized transform matrix inversion interative method is developed for simultaneous T₂ extraction and deconvolution. Compared with the conventional Fourier transform method, this method gives considerable resolution enhancement and linewidth reduction for imaging and spectroscopy. It can also be used to complement other methods such as the maximum entropy method to achieve simultaneous resolution enhancement and noise suppression.