Synthesizing MR Contrast and Resolution through a Patch Matching Technique.

Tissue contrast and resolution of magnetic resonance neuroimaging data have strong impacts on the utility of the data in clinical and neuroscience tasks such as registration and segmentation. Lengthy acquisition times typically prevent routine acquisition of multiple MR tissue contrast images at high resolution, and the opportunity for detailed analysis using these data would seem to be irrevocably lost. This paper describes an example based approach using patch matching from a multiple resolution multiple contrast atlas in order to change an image's resolution as well as its MR tissue contrast from one pulse-sequence to that of another. The use of this approach to generate different tissue contrasts (T2/PD/FLAIR) from a single T1-weighted image is demonstrated on both phantom and real images.