Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, Massachusetts 02129, USA. angli@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu
We present an algorithm to reconstruct chromosphere concentration images directly rather than following the traditional two-step process of reconstructing wavelength-dependent absorption coefficient images and then calculating chromosphere concentration images. This procedure imposes prior spectral information into the image reconstruction that results in a dramatic improvement in the image contrast-to-noise ratio of better than 100%. We demonstrate this improvement with simulations and a dynamic blood phantom experiment.