Department of Radiology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Magn Reson Med. 2013 Jun;69(6):1777-86. doi: 10.1002/mrm.24404. Epub 2012 Jul 20.
Recent technical developments in high-field MRI have enabled high-resolution imaging of the whole spine within clinically acceptable times. However, analysis of such data requires intensity inhomogeneity correction and volume stitching, both of which are typically performed manually. In this work, an automated method for reconstruction of the complete spine from multistation 7T MR data is presented. The method consists of a number of image processing steps, in particular intensity inhomogeneity correction and image registration for recovery of unknown interscan bed translations, which result in high-quality spine volume reconstructions. The registration performance of the developed algorithm was validated on 18 datasets acquired in two or three stations. In all the test cases, our algorithm was able to produce correct reconstruction of the spine volume. The resulting mean registration error (0.53 mm) is found to be lower than the pixel size, demonstrating robustness and accuracy of the proposed method.
近年来，高场 MRI 技术的发展使得在临床可接受的时间内对整个脊柱进行高分辨率成像成为可能。然而，此类数据的分析需要进行强度不均匀性校正和体积拼接，而这两项操作通常都是手动完成的。在这项工作中，提出了一种从多体位 7TMR 数据重建完整脊柱的自动化方法。该方法包含多个图像处理步骤，特别是强度不均匀性校正和图像配准，以恢复未知的扫描间床面平移，从而得到高质量的脊柱体积重建。所开发算法的配准性能在两个或三个体位采集的 18 个数据集上进行了验证。在所有测试案例中，我们的算法都能够正确地重建脊柱体积。所得的平均注册误差（0.53 毫米）低于像素大小，证明了所提出方法的鲁棒性和准确性。
