FIELD: medical equipment.
SUBSTANCE: invention relates to combined medical imaging systems PET/MR. When generating a magnetic resonance (MR) attenuation map, an MR image is segmented to identify a patient's body outline, soft tissue structures, and ambiguous structures comprising bone and/or air. To distinguish between bone and air in ambiguous structures, a nuclear emission image (for example, PET) of same patient or region of interest is segmented. Segmented functional image data is correlated to segmented MR image data to distinguish between bone and air in ambiguous structures. Appropriate radiation attenuation values are assigned respectively to identify air voxels and bone voxels in segmented MR image, and an MR attenuation map is generated from enhanced segmented MR image, in which ambiguity between air and bone has been resolved. MR attenuation map is used to generate an attenuation-corrected nuclear image, which is displayed to a user.
EFFECT: technical result is improvement of distinguishing bone from other tissues or objects, presented in magnetic resonance (MR) image or attenuation map.
15 cl, 3 dwg
