Signal processing algorithms for removing banding artifacts in MRI

摘要

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 LOREGN as compared to general methods commonly employed in similar cases.