Christian Ros1, Jan Sedlacik2, Najat C. Daw3, Ralf Loeffler2, Juergen R. Reichenbach1, Claudia M. Hillenbrand2
1Medical Physics Group, Institute for Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany; 2Department of Radiological Sciences, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, TN, USA; 3Department of Oncology, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, TN, USA
Phased array coils with a large number of elements are used for peripheral and/or body MRI. Activated coil elements that are located far from the measurement volume detect almost no signal and cause the automated system adjustment to improperly increase the gain factor of the respective receiver channels. If such low signal channels are incorporated in the final combination of coil elements, their artificially elevated noise is added to the reconstructed image and may result in degenerated image quality. We propose a novel k-space based algorithm which identifies such channels and discards them from the reconstruction process.
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