• Anant Madabhushi, Jayaram K Udupa, and Gul Moonis.
• Department of Biomedical Engineering, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA.
• J Magn Reson Imaging. 2006 Sep 1; 24 (3): 667-75.

PurposeTo evaluate existing methods of standardization by exploiting the well-known tissue characterizing property of magnetization transfer ratio (MTR) values obtained from MT imaging, and compare the tissue characterizability of standardized T2, proton density (PD), and T1 images against the MTR images.Materials And MethodsImage intensity standardization is a postprocessing method that was designed to correct for acquisition-to-acquisition signal intensity variations (nonstandardness) inherent in magnetic resonance (MR) images. The main idea of this technique is to deform the volume image histogram of each study to match a standard histogram, and to utilize the resulting transformations to map the image intensities into a standard scale. The method has been shown to produce a significant gain in similarity of resulting images and to achieve numeric tissue characterization. In this work we compared PD-, T2-, and T1-weighted images before and after standardization with the corresponding MT images for 10 patient MRI studies of the brain, in terms of the normalized median values on the corresponding image histograms.ResultsNo statistically significant difference was observed between the standardized PD-, T2-, and T1-weighted images and the corresponding MTR images. However, a statistically significant difference was found between the pre- and poststandardized PD-, T2-, and T1-weighted images, and between the prestandardized PD-, T2-, and T1-weighted images and the corresponding MTR images.ConclusionThese results suggest that standardized T2, PD, and T1 images and their tissue-specific intensity signatures may be useful for characterizing disease.

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