An Automated Intensity Correction, Registration & Volume Stitching Algorithm for Reconstruction of the Whole Spine from 7 Tesla MR Data

Oleh Dzyubachyk¹, Boudewijn Lelieveldt¹, ², Jorik Blaas¹, Monique Reijnierse¹, Andrew Webb¹, Rob van der Geest¹

Initial feasibility studies have shown the promise of 7T MRI for studying spine disorders. However, diagnosis based on such data is compromised by the presence of high intensity inhomogeneities and the need to analyze several separately acquired image stacks. In practice, both intensity inhomogeneity correction and volume stitching must be performed manually. Here we present our novel fully automated algorithm for reconstructing a whole spine volume from a set of image stacks acquired on a 7T MR scanner.