Single-plate method for practical modulation transfer function measurement in magnetic resonance imaging

A new "single-plate method" is presented for measuring the modulation transfer function (MTF) in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This method sets a slice plane perpendicular to a single-plate phantom to eliminate contamination effects from the direction perpendicular to the measurement direction in the image plane, which occur with a conventional ramp method. As no practical method for measuring the MTF has been established for MRI, we examined whether the MTF can be measured practically using the single-plate method for various fast imaging sequences. Furthermore, the MTFs of T₁-weighted (T₁W) fast spin echo (FSE) and conventional spin echo (CSE) images obtained using the single-plate method and ramp method were compared. The measured MTFs of T₁W CSE images revealed rectangular shapes with a sharp decrease near the Nyquist cutoff frequency in both phase-encoding (PE) and frequency-encoding (readout, RO) directions. The measured MTFs of T₁W FSE images obtained with centric-order acquisition showed symmetric step-function shapes reflecting k-space segmentation determined by the echo train length (ETL). The measured MTFs of T₂-weighted (T₂W) FSE images showed asymmetric step-function shapes reflecting differences in T₂ decay of signals from samples. The MTFs obtained using the single-plate method significantly reduced the collapse caused by the contamination effect, which is observed in all the MTF measurements of the ramp method. The proposed "single-plate method" simplified the complicated MTF measurement procedure and eliminated the contamination effect. This method is expected to be useful for evaluating the resolution properties of MR fast imaging techniques with a complicated k-space trajectory.