A Geostatistical Approach to Denoise and Interpolate Experimental Complex-Valued B1 Maps

Guillaume Ferrand¹, Michel Luong¹, Pierre Chauvet², Martijn Anton Cloos³, Alexis Amadon³

The knowledge of the complex-valued B1 map generated by each channel of a phased-array RF coil has become essential for high field MRI systems operating above 7 T, a cornerstone for static or dynamic shimming techniques, whose aim is to provide a uniform excitation over any ROI. The maps must be measured experimentally for each RF coil and each subject under examination using an MRI sequence; the more accurate and space resolved the maps, the higher the shimming quality. Unfortunately, high quality maps are time consuming and usually lead to a stronger SAR exposure for the subject. We propose in this abstract a new method based on geostatistical considerations to post-process noisy and poor space resolved B1 maps.