Restoration for Intensity Nonuniformities with Discontinuities in Whole-Body MRI

The reconstruction in MRI assumes a uniform radio-frequency field. However, this is violated due to coil field nonuniformity and sensitivity variations. In whole-body MRI, the nonuniformities are more complex due to the imaging with multiple coils that typically have different overall sensitivities that result in sharp sensitivity changes at the junctions between adjacent coils. These lead to images with anatomically inconsequential intensity nonuniformities that include jump discontinuities of the intensity nonuniformities at the junctions corresponding to adjacent coils. The body is also imaged with multiple contrasts that result in images with different nonuniformities. A method is presented for the joint intensity uniformity restoration of two such images to achieve intensity homogenization. The effect of the spatial intensity distortion on the auto-co-occurrence statistics of each image as well as on the joint-co-occurrence statistics of the two images is modeled in terms of Point Spread Function (PSF). The PSFs and the non-stationary deconvolution of these PSFs from the statistics offer posterior Bayesian expectation estimates of the nonuniformity with Bayesian coring. Subsequently, a piecewise smoothness constraint is imposed for nonuniformity. This uses non-isotropic smoothing of the restoration field to allow the modeling of junction discontinuities. The implementation of the restoration method is iterative and imposes stability and validity constraints of the nonuniformity estimates. The effectiveness and accuracy of the method is demonstrated extensively with whole-body MRI image pairs of thirty-one cancer patients.