Intensity correction of phased-array surface coil images.

Phased-array coils distribute the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance of their small component surface coils over the larger area covered by the entire array. The inhomogeneous sensitivity profiles of the component surface coils result in images with very high signal near the phased-array and decreased signal far from the array. This paper presents a postprocessing algorithm for correcting these coil-related intensity variations. The algorithm's performance was evaluated by correcting images of volunteers acquired with several different receive-only phased-array surface coils.