Wavelet encoding for accelerating temporal resolution in dynamic contrast-enhanced MR imaging

A novel approach for accelerating temporal resolution in dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance (MR) imaging by wavelet encoding is presented. Wavelet encoding has the capability to selectively resolve images because of the multiresolution properties of the wavelet transform. Considering that the contrast feature of an image is preserved mainly in the coarser resolution image, we can achieve temporal acceleration in dynamic contrast-enhanced imaging by updating only coarser resolution images with reduced number of encoding steps. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach and its advantage in reduced sensitivity to motion effects over Fourier based ''keyhole'' technique by computer simulations. Our method is a promising alternative to ''keyhole'' technique and applications to practical settings on an MR imager are being studied. (author)