A Novel Tiered, Multi-Threaded Region Growing Algorithm for Improved Phase Correction for Two-Point Dixon Imaging

Jingfei Ma¹, John D. Hazle¹

We present a novel tiered, multi-threaded region growing algorithm for two-point Dixon water and fat imaging that can overcome the difficulty in phase correction when regions of large noise, artefacts, or isolated tissues are present. Each thread of processing starts from an initial seed and covers only a high-quality region containing the initial seed. Tiered seed masks serve as a quality metric and allow more trusted regions to be processed first even when completely isolated regions are present. Successful application of the algorithm is demonstrated for processing in vivo two-point Dixon images.