From the discovery of the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) phenomenon
in materials by the group of Bloch and Purcell in 1946, the popularity
of the NMR technique has been increased ever since [1,2].
During the next decennia, NMR applications were mainly situated in the structure
analysis of materials. It was not before 1973 that, by Lauterbur,
the NMR phenomena could be exploited for imaging [3].
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was born, and a huge amount of papers
on MRI appeared. Initially, these papers mainly dealt with the improvement
of the MRI experiment itself: new imaging sequences were developed,
and major improvements were reported on MRI hardware. From the early
eighties on, research tended to focus also on processing of
Magnetic Resonance (MR) images.
In this chapter, the principles of MR imaging are briefly reviewed.
For an excellent and complete description of the principles of magnetic
resonance (imaging) we refer to the work of Slichter and Callaghan
[4,5].
Jan Sijbers