Signal Processing Algorithms for Removing Banding Artifacts in MRI

• In magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the balanced steady-state free precession (bSSFP) pulse sequence has shown to be of great interest, due to its relatively high signal-to-noise ratio in a short scan time. However, images acquired with this pulse sequence suffer from banding artifacts due to off-resonance effects. These artifacts typically appear as black bands covering parts of the image and they severely degrade the image quality. In this paper, we present a fast two-step algorithm for estimating the unknowns in the signal model and removing the banding artifacts. The first step consists of rewriting the model in such a way that it becomes linear in the unknowns (this step is named Linearization for Off-Resonance Estimation, or LORE). In the second step, we use a Gauss-Newton iterative optimization with the parameters obtained by LORE as initial guesses. We name the full algorithm LORE-GN. Using both simulated and in vivo data, we show the performance gain associated with using LORE-GN as compared to general methods commonly employed in similar cases.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Signalbehandling (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Signal Processing (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Matematik -- Sannolikhetsteori och statistik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Mathematics -- Probability Theory and Statistics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

MRI

bSSFP

banding artifacts

modeling

estimation

off-resonance

CRB

signal processing

TECHNOLOGY

TEKNIKVETENSKAP

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)