Deconvolution of chemical shift spectra in two- or three-dimensional [19F] MR imaging

The chemical shift spectra of 19F in perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) present a nontrivial impulse response function for magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. The 19F images of organs containing PFCs can be degraded by blurring and ghost image artifacts. Two methods (noise masked deconvolution and maximum entropy deconvolution) are presented that allow the chemical shift spectra of 19F in PFCs to be used to extract high quality MR images free of chemical shift artifact. Both techniques rely on postprocessing of either the raw data or the original image to produce images that are not degraded by the chemical shift spectra of the compound being imaged and that exhibit a signal-to-noise ratio equal to or better than that observed in the original image. The techniques are general in that they can be used with many PFC spectra. Using MR imaging data obtained from phantoms filled with cis/transperfluorodecalin and perfluorotributylamine (FC-43), the methods are compared in terms of their (a) ability to eliminate the chemical shift artifact associated with the PFC spectrum; (b) signal-to-noise performance; and (c) ability to preserve information related to the density and the longitudinal relaxation rate of the resonant nuclei. The utility of these techniques is demonstrated by a series of three-dimensional Fourier transform in vivo images of FC-43 emulsion in a mouse liver.