Partial Volume Artifacts - Video Lesson

Hey everybody and welcome back to our course on artifacts in MRI. In today's lesson we will discuss partial volume averaging. We will talk about what partial volume averaging is, the appearance of partial volume artifacts and how to reduce partial volume artifacts. Let's get started. First, let's review voxels. Voxels are three-dimensional units that make up the MR image. A voxel is like a pixel but with depth. Each voxel has three dimensions, slice thickness, depth and the in plane dimensions, width and height. The in plane dimensions are controlled by the field of view FOV and the matrix size which is the number of pixels used to represent that FOV. Together, these determine voxel volume. Voxel size is directly related to spatial resolution, meaning how well the scanner can display small structures and sharp tissue boundaries. If you need to refresh on any of these terms, there are lessons discussing each step of the MR imaging process. Now