Methods utilizing Padé approximants are investigated for implementation with magnetic resonance imaging data and are presented both for direct image reconstruction and for feature extraction. Padé approximants are a numerical tool that can be used to accelerate the convergence of a slowly converging sequence by estimating the fully converged sequence values from early data points. Padé approximants can be calculated directly from k-space data by solving a set of linear matrix equations to produce signal values for any desired location in the image domain. This gives an estimate of the fully converged signal intensity at each pixel location in the image, raising the possibility of reconstructing a better estimate of the object from a reduced data set. These methods have been tested on phantom and human data both for image reconstruction and for feature extraction. In image reconstruction, considerable con- Image resolution is a critical parameter in many magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies. High-resolution data are often required in order to achieve accurate anatomic assessment and/or quantitative measurements. In conventional phase-encoded MRI, acquiring higher resolution data increases the scan time due to the serial nature of the phase encoding process. This reduces the achievable temporal resolution and also increases the risk of motion artifact corrupting the data. Lowering the resolution decreases the scan time and also increases the level of truncation artifact, which manifests as unrepresentatively high and low signal bands running parallel to any interface where there is an abrupt change in the NMR signal (1). This artifact arises when the collected k-space data do not contain all the high-frequency information present in the slice that has been imaged and is a fundamental property of the Fourier encoding scheme used in MRI. Truncation artifact can be mistaken for, or occlude, structure.For a given rate of data acquisition with a fixed field of view (FoV) (i.e., number of k-space points per unit time), a number of methods have been implemented to achieve faster image update rate, while maintaining high spatial resolution (2-6). These methods increase apparent temporal resolution by partially updating the data in each new image. In keyhole based methods (2,3) new low-resolution data sets are inserted into a high-resolution reference to give a dynamic series. In sliding window techniques a number of k-space segments are acquired and used to dynamically update a high-resolution data set by replacing the oldest segment with the newest (4,5). The k-t BLAST (6) approach allows for reduced data acquisitions by tailoring the sampling strategy to exploit correlations in both k-space and time.Another approach is to extrapolate from incomplete data. This approach has been applied to MR imaging to reduce truncation artifacts and improve resolution (7-9). In the TERA algorithm, the MR data are modeled as a subset of the transient response of an infinite impulse filter and the data are approximated by a determini...