About the Center

The Mission of the Center

The Center was established to promote the development of ultrafast imaging methods and to foster international collaboration between investigators conducting research on emerging techniques. Our goal is to rapidly develop and disseminate new clinical applications that are enabled by acquisition techniques that simultaneously provide significantly higher spatial and temporal resolution and by reconstruction algorithms that preserve or enhance signal to noise ratio. The Center will investigate applications of these emerging techniques in all areas of medical imaging.

Background

Traditional imaging techniques usually obey the Nyquist sampling theorem that specifies how many data samples are required for exact reconstruction. For the past decade the University of Wisconsin magnetic resonance imaging group has been developing highly undersampled data acquisition techniques that permit clinically acceptable violations of the Nyquist theorem by factors often as large as several hundred. This is typically accomplished through 2D or 3D radial undersampling synergistically combined with constrained reconstruction techniques that enhance SNR. The latter also provide improved image quality or dose reduction in applications such as DSA, X-ray CT, positron tomography, SPECT and ultrasound.