MRI Composing for Whole Body Imaging

Whole-body magnetic resonance imaging is an emerging application gaining vast clinical interest during the last years. Although recent technological advances shortened the longish acquisition time, this is still the limiting factor avoiding its wide-spread clinical usage. The acquisition of images with large field-of-view helps to relieve this drawback, but leads to significantly distorted images. In this paper, a novel scheme for MRI composing is presented. The approach is based on simultaneous registration of two MRI volumes to their linear weighted average. The method successfully compensates for the distortions and allows to generate high-resolution whole body images. Results on several in-vivo data sets are presented.