Estimation of relaxation time distributions in magnetic resonance imaging

Magnetic resonance imaging techniques can be used to measure some biophysical properties of tissue. In this context, the T-2 relaxation time is an important parameter for soft-tissue contrast. The authors develop a new technique to estimate the integral of the distribution of T2 relaxation time without imposing any constraint other than the monotonicity of the underlying cumulative relaxation time distribution. They explore the properties of the estimation and its applications for the analysis of breast tissue data. As they show, an extension of linear discriminant analysis is found to distinguish well between two classes of breast tissue.