Analysis of Signal-to-Noise Ratio in High Field Multi-dimensional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

고자장 다차원 자기공명영상에서 신호대잡음비 분석

In multi-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging, data is obtained in the spatial frequency domain. Since the signal variation in the spatial frequency domain is much larger than that in the spatial domain, analog-to-digital converts with wide conversion bits are required. In this paper, the quantization noise in magnetic resonance imaging is analyzed. The signal-to-quantization noise ratio(SQNR) in the reconstructed image is derived from the level of quantization in the data acquisition. Since the quantization noise is proportional to the signal amplitude, it becomes more dominant in high field imaging. Using the derived formula the SQNR for several MRI systems are evaluated, and it is shown that the quantization noise can be a limiting factor in high field imaging, especially in three dimensional imaging in magnetic resonance imaging.