Sodium
MRI suffers from low signal-to-noise ratio, which can be compensated by
applying surface coils fitting the geometry of interest. Inhomogeneous coil
profiles hinder absolute quantification of in vivo tissue sodium concentration,
which is crucial for clinical assessment of pathological changes. Adequate
corrections of intensity inhomogeneities of reception radiofrequency fields are
essential and most standard proton imaging correction methods require manual
thresholding. We present a novel and automatic correction approach by postprocessing
images with Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition without additional scan time.
It reduces signal variations by 39%. This is shown in phantoms and in vivo.
