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SEGUE: a Speedy rEgion-Growing algorithm for Unwrapping Estimated phase

Karsa, A; Shmueli, K; (2018) SEGUE: a Speedy rEgion-Growing algorithm for Unwrapping Estimated phase. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 10.1109/TMI.2018.2884093. Green open access

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Abstract

Recent Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques, such as Quantitative magnetic Susceptibility Mapping (QSM), employ the signal phase to reveal disease-related changes in tissue composition including iron or calcium content. The MRI phase is also routinely used in functional and diffusion MRI for distortion correction. However, phase images are wrapped into a range of 2π radians. PRELUDE is the gold standard method for robust, spatial, 3-dimensional, MRI phase unwrapping. Unfortunately, PRELUDE's computation time can reach 15 minutes for a severely wrapped brain image and nearly 10 hours to unwrap a full head-and-neck image on a standard PC. Here we develop a Speedy rEgion-Growing algorithm for Unwrapping Estimated phase (SEGUE) based on similar principles to PRELUDE, implemented with additional methods for acceleration. We compared PRELUDE and SEGUE in numerical phantoms, and using in-vivo images of the brain, head-and-neck, and pelvis acquired in 4-5 healthy volunteers and at 4-6 echo times. To overcome chemical-shift-induced errors within the head-and-neck and pelvic images, we also investigated applying both techniques within fat and water masks separately. SEGUE provided almost identical unwrapped phase maps to the gold standard PRELUDE. SEGUE was (1.5 to 70 times) faster than PRELUDE, especially in severely wrapped images at later echoes as well as in the head-and-neck and pelvic images. Applying these techniques within fat and water masks separately successfully removed chemical-shiftinduced errors. SEGUE's MATLAB implementation is available for download. SEGUE is a general unwrapping algorithm not specific to MRI and could, therefore, be used in images acquired with other modalities.

Type: Article
Title: SEGUE: a Speedy rEgion-Growing algorithm for Unwrapping Estimated phase
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1109/TMI.2018.2884093
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1109/TMI.2018.2884093
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © (c) 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to use this material for any other purposes must be obtained from the IEEE by sending a request to pubs-permissions@ieee.org. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. For more information, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.
Keywords: Magnetic resonance imaging, Three-dimensional displays, Merging, Standards, Brain, Two dimensional displays, Phase distortion, diffusion, distortion correction, fMRI, functional, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, MRI, phase unwrapping, QSM, susceptibility mapping
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Med Phys and Biomedical Eng
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10065154
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