Since the advent of magnetic resonance (MR) imaging as a sound
medical imaging technique there has been a need to classify the tissues
in the images created. Typically the radiologist has been responsible for
the evaluation of the images produced by the MRI machine. In any given
MRI there exists many different types of tissues each with a certain concentration
of spin densities. Each one of these tissues has a unique T1
and T2 decay times along with a with a unique spin density.
The T2 values are indicative of the structure of the tissue,
and if the T2 time of a particular tissue has been previously
determined the type of tissue can be determined. This is useful for automatic
identification of disease, tumors, or any tissue for that matter. This
information is characteristic for a particular tissue across MRI platforms.
When the imaging sequence is specified that keeps the time of repetition
(TR) constant, the image is a T2 weighted image. The method
used in this paper, the Direct Exponential Curve Resolution algorithm (DECRA),
attempts to evaluate these unique T2 times and classify the
images. Antalek and Windig (4)
have shown that by using DECRA it is possible to classify images based
on T2. The goal of this experiment is to determine the weaknesses
and limitations of DECRA when applied to synthetically generated images
and real images obtained from a MRI machine. This method was analyzed to
see if there was a possibility of improvement for future application and
improvement. To test DECRA it was applied to synthetic images and real
images obtained from an imager. The synthetic images where given noise
to try to simulate a real image and to see how high the signal to noise
ratio had to be. DECRA was able to segment the noiseless synthetic images,
but began to fail as the numbers of pixels were reduced. When it was applied
to real image DECRA performed well only after manual separations of the
test images. DECRA has shown that it can a viable method to segment data
that is related by relaxation constants.