Patent ID: 9739854
Date: 2017-08-22
CPC Classifications: A61B,G01R

Claim:
1. A magnetic resonance imaging apparatus, comprising: a reception coil including a plurality of sub-coils and a plurality of elements; one or more reception channels; an output pattern determining unit to determine (a) information that identifies using elements used for forming an output channel and from among the plurality of elements and (b) a synthetic pattern for synthesizing reception signals received by the using elements as an output pattern and according to imaging conditions so that a number of the output channels to be formed is equal to or less than a number of the reception channels; and a synthesizer to synthesize reception signals received by the using elements according to the output pattern to form the output channels and to output the synthesized reception signals to the reception channels, wherein the output pattern determining unit includes a synthetic pattern table that registers, for each sub-coil amongst the sub-coils, an imaging range for the sub-coil, at least one synthetic pattern candidate that can be obtained by a corresponding number of elements constituting the sub-coil, and a number of output channels that are formed by reception signals received through the sub-coil, for each synthetic pattern candidate amongst the at least one synthetic pattern candidate, and the output pattern determining unit determines the output pattern so as to maximize a S/N ratio of a synthesized image synthesized based on images reconstructed from the signals received through the reception channels, and wherein the output pattern determining unit considers each sub-coil in turn in order from a sub-coil closer to an imaging center specified by the imaging conditions, to select a synthetic pattern candidate in which the number of the output channels is the maximum is selected until an accumulated total number of the output channels reaches a maximum value equal to or less than a number of the reception channels, and the output pattern and the using sub-coil are determined based on the selected synthetic pattern candidate and the sub-coil registered in association with the selected synthetic pattern candidate in the synthetic pattern table.