Patent ID: 9310451
Filing Date: 2016-04-12
CPC Classification: A61B,G01R

Claim Text:
1. A method for measuring oxygen saturation in blood flowing in a vessel using magnetic resonance (MR), the method comprising: obtaining by at least one processor non-transitory signals representing an MR image sequence of the vessel from an MR acquisition device, the MR image sequence including a plurality of image data sets with different echo time (TE) encoding, and different Fourier velocity encoding (FVE), the FVE being obtained using different bipolar gradients having different amplitudes to encode respective different velocities for each TE, the FVE defining a velocity dimension in the MR image sequence; for each TE, applying by the at least one processor a Fourier transformation along the velocity dimension to measure a velocity distribution of non-transitory tissue signals in each voxel of the MR image sequence; measuring by the at least one processor non-transitory tissue signals indicative of flowing blood apart from non-transitory tissue signals indicative of static tissue, based on the velocity distribution; and determining measuring by the at least one processor oxygen saturation in blood using only the non-transitory tissue signals indicative of flowing blood; outputting by the at least one processor non-transitory signals representative of the measured oxygen saturation to make available to a user or a device.