Target-point combination of MR images.

A method is described for combining multiple magnetic resonance images of the same anatomic slice to produce a single image which incorporates the favorable contrast features of each of the original images. The target-point method is a general method that includes linear combination as a subset and is designed to deal with the clinical need to maximize the contrast-to-noise ratio between several pairs of tissue simultaneously. Although it is intrinsically a nonlinear method, noise propagates approximately uniformly into the combined image. In examples of brain images the target-point method produces images with higher mutual contrast than the first principal component weighted sun image.