Consistent intensity inhomogeneity correction in water–fat MRI. Issue 2 (30th October 2014) - Andersson, Thord
Abstract Purpose To quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the water‐signal performance of the consistent intensity inhomogeneity correction (CIIC) method to correct for intensity inhomogeneities Methods Water–fat volumes were acquired using 1.5 Tesla (T) and 3.0T symmetrically sampled 2‐point Dixon three‐dimensional MRI. Two datasets: (i) 10 muscle tissue regions of interest (ROIs) from 10 subjects acquired with both 1.5T and 3.0T whole‐body MRI. (ii) Seven liver tissue ROIs from 36 patients imaged using 1.5T MRI at six time points after Gd‐EOB‐DTPA injection. The performance of CIIC was evaluated quantitatively by analyzing its impact on the dispersion and bias of the water image ROI intensities, and qualitatively using side‐by‐side image comparisons. Results CIIC significantly ( P1.5T≤2.3×10−4, P3.0T≤1.0×10−6) decreased the nonphysiological intensity variance while preserving the average intensity levels. The side‐by‐side comparisons showed improved intensity consistency ( Pint⁡≤10−6) while not introducing artifacts ( Part=0.024) nor changed appearances ( Papp≤10−6). Conclusion CIIC improves the spatiotemporal intensity consistency in regions of a homogenous tissue type. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2015;42:468–476.