Abraam S. Soliman1, 2, Jing Yuan2, Karl Vigen3, James A. White, 24, Terry M. Peters1, 2, Charles A. McKenzie, 15
1Biomedical Engineering, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada; 2Imaging Research Laboratories, Robarts Research Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada; 3Department of Radiology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States; 4Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada; 5Medical Biophysics, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada
Field map estimation has been the primary obstacle for obtaining robust water/fat separation. A novel two-stage approach is proposed to estimate the field inhomogeneities. The first stage applies a convex optimization based algorithm called Continuous Max-Flow that can reliably achieve a global minimum solution. The output is used in the second stage to initialize the well-known IDEAL method to estimate the field map, and hence, water and fat components. Our approach was tested on cardiac images of normal subjects, and has shown to be faster and more robust that existing field map estimation methods.