Metallic Artifacts on MR Imaging and Methods for Their Reduction

Metallic artifacts on MR imaging are typically induced by differences in magnetic susceptibility between the metallic implant and surrounding tissue. Conventional techniques for metal artifact reduction require MR machines with low field strength, shift in the frequency-encoding and phase-encoding directions according to the axis of metallic implant, increased receiver bandwidth and matrix, decreased slice thickness, and utilization of the short tau inversion recovery or Dixon method for fat-suppression. Slice-encoding for metal artifact correction and multi-acquisition variable-resonance image combination can dramatically reduce the number of metallic artifacts. However, these sequences have a considerably long acquisition time. Furthermore, the recently developed acceleration techniques including compressed sensing can solve this problem.