From Esaote S.p.A.; Esaote introduced the new G-SCAN at the RSNA in Dec. 2004. The G-SCAN covers almost all musculoskeletal applications including the spine. The tilting gantry is designed for scanning in weight-bearing positions. This unique MRI scanner is developed in line with the Esaote philosophy of creating high quality MRI systems that are easy to install and that have a low breakeven point.

Quick Overview

Ghosting artifacts are in the most cases caused by movements (e.g., respiratory motion, bowel motion, arterial pulsations, swallowing, and heartbeat) and appear in the phase encoding direction.

Ghosting artifacts can be reduced by respiratory and cardiac triggering, the use of breath holding pulse sequences, flow compensation or presaturation pulses, depending on their origin. To reduce bowel motion also pharmaceuticals, such as glucagon or scopolamine are useful. This will decrease artifacts from both peristalsis and breathing.

See also Motion Artifact, Phase Encoded Motion Artifact, Cardiac Motion Artifact, and Artifact Reduction - Motion.

(GMR) The application of strategic gradient pulses can compensate the objectionable spin phase effects of flow motion. That means the reducing of flow effects, e.g. gradient moment nulling of the first order of flow. The simplest velocity-compensated pulse sequence is the symmetrical second echo of a spin echo pulse sequence.
Gradient field changes can be configured in such a way that during an echo the magnetization signal vectors for all pixels have zero phase angle independent of velocities, accelerations etc. of the measured tissue. E.g. the adjustment to zero at the time TE of the net moments of the amplitude of the waveform of the magnetic field gradients with time. The zeroth moment is the area under the curve, the first moment is the 'center of gravity' etc. The aim is to minimize the phase shifts acquired by the transverse magnetization of excited nuclei moving along the gradients (including the effect of refocusing RF pulses), particularly for the reduction of image artifacts due to motion.
Also called Flow Compensation (FC), Motion Artifact Suppression Technique (MAST), Flow motion compression (STILL), Gradient Rephasing (GR), Shimadzu Motion Artifact Reduction Technique (SMART).

From ONI Medical Systems, Inc.;
MSK-Extremeâ„¢MRI system is a dedicated high field extremity imaging device, designed to provide orthopedic surgeons and other physicians with detailed diagnostic images of the foot, ankle, knee, hand, wrist and elbow, all with the clinical confidence and advantages derived from high field, whole body MRI units. The light weight (less than 650 kg) of the OrthOne System performs rapid patient studies, is easy to operate, has a patient friendly open environment and can be installed in a practice office or hospital, all at a cost similar to a low field extremity machine.
New features include a more powerful operating system that offers increased scan speed as well as a 160-mm knee coil with higher signal to noise ratio, and the option of a CD burner.

Quick Overview
Please note that there are different common names for this artifact.

Machine imperfection-based artifacts manifest themselves due to the fact that the odd k-space lines are acquired in a different direction than the even k-space lines. Slight differences in timing result in shifts of the echo in the acquisition window. By the shift theorem, such shifts in the time domain data then produce linear phase differences in the frequency domain data.
Without correction, such phase differences in every second line produce striped ghosts with a shift of half the field of view, so-called Nyquist ghosts. Shifts in the applied magnetic field can also produce similar (but constant in amplitude) ghosts.
This artifact is commonly seen in an EPI image and can arise from both, hardware and sample imperfections.
A further source of machine-based artifact arises from the need to acquire the signal as quickly as possible. For this reason the EPI signal is often acquired during times when the gradients are being switched. Such sampling effectively means that the k-space sampling is not uniform, resulting in ringing artifacts in the image.

Such artifacts can be minimized by careful setup of the spectrometer and/or correction of the data. For this reasons reference data are often collected, either as a separate scan or embedded in the imaging data. The non-uniform sampling can be removed by knowing the form of the gradient switching. It is possible to regrid the data onto a uniform k-space grid.