Inherent Insensitivity to B1 Field Inhomogeneity Using Regularized Nonlinear Inversion Reconstruction

Aiming Lu¹, Keith R. Thulborn¹

Signal intensity variation that arises from inhomogeneous transmit and receive fields not only complicates the qualitative appearance of MR images but also presents the major source of error in quantitative MRI/S. To date no approach can correct for both fields in vivo effectively. An iterative nonlinear image reconstruction method was proposed recently for parallel imaging, which can jointly reconstruct the images and estimate the coil sensitivity. Here we show that this algorithm may inherently compensate for both field effects, therefore it may play a vital role in MRI/S beyond its application for parallel imaging.