Sotirios A. Tsaftaris1,2, Xiangzhi Zhou2,
Rohan Dharmakumar2
1Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States; 2Radiology,
Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, United States
Flow
artifacts in MR images can appear as image ghosts within and outside the body
cavity. Technical improvements to suppress these ghosts often rely on expert
scoring or on semi-automated methods demanding tissue segmentation to
evaluate the efficacy of the methods. These approaches can be
labor/computation intensive, introduce observer bias, or error-prone if
tissue segmentation is used. Herein we propose two fully automated
image-processing methods relying on the statistical properties of background
pixels to assess the presence of flow artifacts (appearing as image ghosts)
without requiring segmentation. We demonstrate that the automated methods are
as effective as image scoring approaches that rely on expert reviewers.