Coil Sensitivity Estimation and Intensity Normalisation for Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Abstract: The quest for improved efficiency in magnetic resonance imaging has motivated the development of strategies like parallel imaging where arrays of multiple receiver coils are operated simultaneously in parallel. The objective of this project was to find an estimation of phased-array coil sensitivity profiles of magnetic resonance images of the human body. These sensitivity maps can then be used to perform an intensity inhomogeneity correction of the images. Through investigative work in Matlab, a script was developed that uses data embedded in raw data from a magnetic resonance scan, to generate coil sensitivities for each voxel of the volume of interest and recalculate them to two-dimensional sensitivity maps of the corresponding diagnostic images. The resulting mapped sensitivity profiles can be used in Sensitivity Encoding where a more exact solution can be obtained using the carefully estimated sensitivity maps of the images.