Direct and Indirect Surface Coil Correction for Cardiac Perfusion MRI

Hui Xue¹, Sven Zuehlsdorff², Jens Guehring¹

Although the first-pass myocardial perfusion MRI has proven its effectiveness in the early diagnosis of suspected ischemic heart diseases, this technique is still not routinely used. Certain technical difficulties prevent perfusion MRI from being added into the clinical workflow. Among of them includes the B1-field inhomogeneity caused by non-uniform characteristics of the receiver coils which still lacks intensive studies, when compared to perfusion imaging sequences or motion compensation. We therefore propose algorithms to perform the surface coil inhomogeneity correction (SCC) using proton density (PD) weighted images and B-Spline Free-Form Deformation (FFD).