Automatic coil selection for streak artifact reduction in radial MRI

Abstract

In radial MR imaging, streaking artifacts contaminating the entire field of view can arise from regions at the outer edges of the prescribed field of view. This can occur even when the Nyquist criterion is satisfied within the desired field of view. These artifacts become exacerbated when parts of the object lie in the superior/inferior regions of the scanner where the gradient strengths become weakened. When multiple coil arrays are used for signal reception, coils at the outer edges can be disabled before data acquisition to reduce the artifact levels. However, as the weakened gradient strengths near the edges often distort the object, causing the signal to become highly concentrated into a small region, the streaks are often not completely removed. Data from certain coils can also be excluded during reconstruction by visually inspecting the individual coil images, but this is impractical for routine use. In this work, a postprocessing method is proposed to automatically identify those coils whose images contain high levels of streaking for subsequent exclusion during reconstruction. The proposed method was demonstrated in vivo dynamic contrast enhanced MRI datasets acquired using a three-dimensional hybrid radial sequence. The results demonstrate that the proposed strategy substantially improves the image quality and show excellent agreement with images reconstructed with manually determined coil selection.