A respiratory motion artifact reduction method in magnetic resonance imaging of the chest

An image reconstruction algorithm based on the assumption that the respiratory motion of the chest is linear in space and arbitrary in time is presented. The linear respiratory motion causes phase distortion on the magnetic resonance (MR) data. As a result of this motion, the MR data are the samples of the Fourier transform of the spin density on a nonrectangular grid. In image reconstruction. before taking the inverse Fourier transform, the phase distortion is compensated for, and the rectangular samples are interpolated from the existing nonrectangular samples. A significant amount of motion artifact suppression is achieved with a rough knowledge on the motion using this method. It is demonstrated that the respiratory motion model parameters can be estimated using the information hidden in the motion artifacts.