Abstract #2892

Virtual Coil Phase Determination Using Region Growing: Description and Application to Direct Virtual Coil Parallel Imaging Reconstruction

Philip James Beatty¹, Shaorong Chang², Ersin Bayram², Ananth Madhuranthakam³, Huanzhou Yu¹, Scott B. Reeder⁴, Jean H. Brittain⁵

¹Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, United States; ²GE Healthcare, Waukesha, WI, United States; ³Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Boston, MA, United States; ⁴Departments of Radiology and Medical Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States; ⁵Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Madison, WI, United States

Setting the phase of the virtual coil in the Direct Virtual Coil (DVC) reconstruction technique is both critical to achieving a high quality reconstruction and challenging, especially with high channel count arrays. In this work, a region growing approach to setting the virtual coil phase is described and evaluated in the context of the DVC technique. We demonstrate that the approach is able to generate sensible virtual coil phase even in challenging situations.