Philips Compressed Sense

New Powerful Way to Accelerate MRI Scanning

The new Philips Compressed Sense allowes up to 50% acceleration of individual scans with high image quality. It is suitable for all anatomies and can be used for all anatomical contrasts, in both 2D and 3D. Visit Philips.com for more information about the technology.

Compressed sensing is a term from the field of digital signal processing. When a signal is digitally sampled, like it happens in an MRI scanner, the signal is not recorded continuously (like old cassette players used to do) but at intervals.

A famous theorem from digital signal analysis, the Nyquist theorem, states that for constructing a perfect MR image of 256 x 256 pixels, it is required to sample 256 lines in k-space, each sampled in 256 positions. By doing less, the acquisition will be faster, but the reconstructed image will always be distorted one way or another.

This is exactly what happens with traditional acceleration techniques in MRI, such as halfscan, radial, spiral, increased voxel size and parallel imaging. All of these methods skip parts of k-space during acquisition in order to reduce acquisition time. However, there will always be a penalty: either a reduced signal to-noise ratio (halfscan, parallel imaging), lower image resolution (increased voxel size) or image artifacts (spiral, radial).

Compressed SENSE is not different, but in practice it is often more forgiving than other acceleration techniques in terms of image distortion and SNR, because it can be designed to primarily sample the MR signals that matter most, while leaving out the rest.