Quantitative Susceptibility Map Reconstruction with Magnitude Prior

Berkin Bilgic¹, Audrey P. Fan¹, Elfar Adalsteinsson^1,2

Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM) aims to quantify tissue magnetic susceptibility χ with applications such as tissue contrast enhancement, venous blood oxygenation, and iron quantification. Estimation of χ from phase is ill posed due to zeros on a conical surface in the Fourier space; hence χ inversion benefits from additional regularization. In our work, we propose enhanced regularization with demonstrated performance benefits by incorporation of magnitude priors. By encoding spatial priors derived from magnitude into l1 regularization scheme via the Focal Underdetermined System Solver (FOCUSS) algorithm, we report high quality QSM both on a numerical phantom and in-vivo data at 7T.