Abstract #3094

Computationally Efficient Removal of Inhomogeneities at the Cortical Surface in MR Phase Images.

Amanda Ng^1,2, Zhaolin Chen^2,3, Jingxin Zhang¹, Gary F. Egan^2,4, Leigh A. Johnston^2,5

¹Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia; ²Howard Florey Institute, Florey Neuroscience Institutes, Melbourne, Australia; ³Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia; ⁴Centre for Neuroscience, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia; ⁵Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering & NICTA Victorian Research Laboratory, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

Phase images in MRI are subject to inhomogeneities at the cortical surface due to susceptibility artefacts induced by air/tissue interfaces and insufficient filtering at foreground/background borders. We present a computationally efficient method of removing these inhomogeneities from phase unwrapped images using spatially dependent filters and omission of background voxels from the filtering calculations. The method is shown to successfully reveal structural detail in the cortical surface that is otherwise obscured in traditional filtering methods.