MRI multicomponent relaxometry based on compressive sensing

A novel application of ℓ
¹
-norm minimization in the MRI field is presented. The novel methodology, called Intra Voxel Analysis (IVA), by combining different acquisitions with standard resolution, is able to investigate the presence of different contributions, i.e., of different tissues, inside each imaged voxel. The approach is somehow similar to spectroscopy, but instead of searching different resonance frequencies, it discriminates within each voxel the tissues characterized by different spin-spin relaxation times. The proposed methodology is able to work on MR images acquired at full resolution by using any acquisition scheme. A phantom has been built and images for testing the approach.