MRI Artifacts

MRI Artifacts

Unwanted pattern or structure that

does not represent the actual anatomy
and often misleads/ interferes with the
diagnosis.
 Classification

• Magnetic and RF field Distortion

Artifacts
• Reconstruction Artifacts
• Noise-Induced Artifacts
Magnetic and RF field Distortion
Artifacts
 Ferromagnetic Material

Produces a local signal loss and a

warping distortion of the surrounding
areas.
 Ferromagnetic Material

Metal contains no hydrogen, resulting

in a signal void on that location.
A small band of metal in the patient’s ponytail.
A metallic zipper in the patient’s shirt.
 Ferromagnetic Material

Utilizing lower field strength can

reduce metal artifacts
 Body shape, Conductivity, and Extension

The patient’s shape, electrical

conductivity, and filling of the rf coil all
become factors in creating
inhomogeneity of both the primary
static magnetic field and the
transmitted RF pulse.
 Chemical Shift

Chemical-shift artifacts are present

wherever tissues sharing a common
border have considerably different
molecular organization.
 Chemical Shift

The most prominent examples seen are

at interfaces of fat and the other body
tissues.
 Chemical Shift

The artifact is seen as a bright rim of

signal at one interface and a dark rim
on the opposite side of the particular
organ.
Reconstruction Artifacts
 Aliasing

One of the most commonly

encountered artifact. Also known as
the wrap-around artifact.
 Aliasing

Occurs when portions of the patient’s

body are outside of the FOV but within
the area of RF excitation.
 Aliasing

When hydrogen nuclei outside the area

of interest are excited, the signal they
return is interpreted to have originated
from within the imaging FOV.
 Aliasing

Aliasing artifact can be avoided by

using a larger FOV.
 Partial Volume Averaging

Occurs whenever the particular

structure of interest is contained within
two tissues next with each other.
 Partial Volume Averaging

These artifact is worse with thick slices

and large voxels.
 Partial Volume Averaging

PVA can be reduced by using thinner

slices.
 Truncation or “ringing artifact”

Truncation artifact appears as multiple

rings of regular periodicity or
duplication at transitions between
high- and low-intensity signals.
 Truncation

Truncation is a geometric term that

describes the lessening by cutting off,
or lopping, the vertex of a cone or
cylinder.
 Truncation

Occurs when the reconstruction matrix

is asymmetric. (128x256 instead of
256x256)
 Truncation

Sometimes called as Gibbs

phenomenon
 Quadrature Detection

A zero line or zipper artifact is caused

by RF feed through from the RF
transmitter along the frequency-
encoding direction at the central or
reference frequency of the imaging
sequence.
 Quadrature Detection

Can also be produced by RF noise from

extraneous sources and is sometimes
called an FID line.
 Quadrature Detection

The FID or zero-line artifact occurs

because of the remnant FID that occurs
after the 180-degree pulse.
Noise-Induced Artifacts
 Motion

An additional group of artifacts is

caused by voluntary, involuntary, and
even microscopic physiologic motion.
 Motion

Repetitive motion can produce the

typical “ghosting,” or irregular wavelike
lines of increased and decreased
signal.
 Misregistration

If patient motion occurs between a

mask image and a subsequent image,
the subtracted image contains
misregistration artifacts.
 Off-resonance artifact

Degradation of the image as a result of

inexact tuning of the RF transmitter
and/or receiver to the larmour
frequency, resulting in an overall noisy
image.