Patent ID: 8634623

Claim:
A method for correcting magnetic resonance (MR) angiography images generated with a time-of-flight (TOF) MR angiography technique, said method comprising: acquiring MR signals from a target volume in which blood flows in a vessel, by executing a TOF MR angiography sequence to generate multiple MR angiography data sets; in a processor supplied with said MR angiography data sets, generating an MR angiography image respectively from each of said MR angiography data sets, thereby producing multiple MR angiography images each comprised of pixels, with said pixels comprising vessel pixels representing a vessel in which said blood flows, background pixels representing tissue in said target volume other than said vessels and said blood flowing therein, and noise pixels representing substantially only non-image-relevant noise; in said processor, automatically identifying said background pixels in the respective MR angiography images by executing a separation algorithm that separates said background pixels from said noise pixels and said vessel pixels in each of said MR angiography images; in said processor, determining a signal profile of said background pixels across an entirety of the target volume; in said processor, normalizing the pixels in at least one predetermined set of pixels in the multiple MR angiography images of the target volume, with the signal profile of the background pixels with background signal, to produce normalized MR angiography images, as corrected MR images; and at an output of said processor, making said corrected MR images available in electronic form in at least one data file.