Virtual Body Coil Calibration for Phased-Array Imaging

Martin Buehrer¹, Peter Boesiger¹, Sebastian Kozerke¹

Image-based parallel imaging methods such as sensitivity encoding require accurate coil sensitivity information. Obtaining coil sensitivity maps requires a homogeneous reference image to remove anatomy related structures in the single coil images. Commonly, such a reference image is provided by the body coil. This procedure, however, makes a separate reference scan necessary. In this work we present a method which extracts the complex sensitivity information from fully sampled single coil images without the need for acquiring additional body coil data, allowing for phase preserving self calibrated SENSE reconstruction.