Lee Byung Il, Lee Suk-Ho, Kim Tae-Seong, Kwon Ohin, Woo Eung Je, Seo Jin Keun
Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Electronics and Information, Kyung Hee University, Kyungki, Korea.
IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2005 Nov;52(11):1912-20. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2005.856258.
Recent progress in magnetic resonance electrical impedance tomography (MREIT) research via simulation and biological tissue phantom studies have shown that conductivity images with higher spatial resolution and accuracy are achievable. In order to apply MREIT to human subjects, one of the important remaining problems to be solved is to reduce the amount of the injection current such that it meets the electrical safety regulations. However, by limiting the amount of the injection current according to the safety regulations, the measured MR data such as the z-component of magnetic flux density Bz in MREIT tend to have low SNR and get usually degraded in their accuracy due to the nonideal data acquisition system of an MR scanner. Furthermore, numerical differentiations of the measured Bz required by the conductivity image reconstruction algorithms tend to further deteriorate the quality and accuracy of the reconstructed conductivity images. In this paper, we propose a denoising technique that incorporates a harmonic decomposition. The harmonic decomposition is especially suitable for MREIT due to the physical characteristics of Bz. It effectively removes systematic and random noises, while preserving important key features in the MR measurements, so that improved conductivity images can be obtained. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed denoising technique is effective for MREIT, producing significantly improved quality of conductivity images. The denoising technique will be a valuable tool in MREIT to reduce the amount of the injection current when it is combined with an improved MREIT pulse sequence.
通过模拟和生物组织模型研究,磁共振电阻抗断层成像(MREIT)研究取得的最新进展表明,可以获得具有更高空间分辨率和精度的电导率图像。为了将MREIT应用于人体受试者,有待解决的一个重要遗留问题是减少注入电流的量,使其符合电气安全规定。然而,根据安全规定限制注入电流的量时,MREIT中诸如磁通密度Bz的z分量等测量的MR数据往往具有较低的信噪比,并且由于MR扫描仪的非理想数据采集系统,其精度通常会下降。此外,电导率图像重建算法所需的测量Bz的数值微分往往会进一步降低重建电导率图像的质量和精度。在本文中,我们提出了一种结合谐波分解的去噪技术。由于Bz的物理特性,谐波分解特别适用于MREIT。它有效地去除了系统噪声和随机噪声,同时保留了MR测量中的重要关键特征,从而可以获得改进的电导率图像。模拟和实验结果表明,所提出的去噪技术对MREIT有效,可显著提高电导率图像的质量。当与改进的MREIT脉冲序列结合使用时,该去噪技术将成为MREIT中减少注入电流量的有价值工具。