Quantifying effective magnetic moments of narrow cylindrical objects in MRI

A new procedure for accurately measuring effective magnetic moments of long cylinders is presented. Partial volume, dephasing and phase aliasing effects are naturally included and overcome in our approach. Images from a typical gradient echo sequence at one single echo time are usually sufficient to quantify the effective magnetic moment of a cylindrical-like object. Only pixels in the neighborhood of the object are needed. Our approach can accurately quantify the magnetic moments and distinguish subpixel changes of cross sections between cylindrical objects. Uncertainties of our procedure are studied through the error propagation method. Images acquired with different parameters are used to test the robustness of our method. Alternate approaches and their limitations to extract magnet moments of objects with different orientations are also discussed. Our method has the potential to be applied to any long object whose cross section is close to a disk.