Patent Document ID: 9885769
Application ID: 14294677
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method that uses a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) system in generating a spatial frequency distribution from a sample of a structure, wherein the method comprises: using the MRI system and its associated processors in order to perform the following: a) subjecting the sample to a magnetic field; b) subjecting the sample to magnetic resonance excitation; c) receiving an echo signal from the sample while the sample is subjected to a magnetic field gradient; d) transforming the echo signal into a corresponding transform domain, using an invertible linear transform while maintaining only linear operations in order to ensure the use of only linear signal processing steps; e) identifying a region of interest within resulting transform domain of d), and calculating a linear windowing function corresponding to the region of interest; f) applying the linear windowing function of e) to the echo signal in order to remove echo signal coming from regions of the sample outside of the region of interest; g) analyzing the complex-valued one dimensional spatial frequency content of the windowed echo signal obtained in f) in order to derive a one dimensional spatial frequency distribution from the region of interest within the sample of the structure without the need to create an image; and h) displaying a result based on the resulting derived one dimensional spatial frequency distribution.