Wenmiao Lu1, Kim Butts Pauly2, Garry Evan Gold2, John Mark Pauly3, Brian Andrew Hargreaves2
1Electrical & Electronic Engr., Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore; 2Radiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA; 3Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Slice encoding for metal artifact correction (SEMAC) is recently proposed to obtain artifact-free MR images near metallic implants. SEMAC corrects through-plane distortions by summing the resolved signals from multiple slices. This can lead to the degradation in SNR without careful noise considerations. This work describes two approaches to avoid the SNR degradation, namely eliminating the relative phases between the slices and excluding the slices containing only background noise. Maintaining high SNR of the correction results is particularly important for incorporating SEMAC with various acceleration techniques.