Comprehensive Comparison of Six Referenceless PRF Shift MR Thermometry Methods

Changjun Tie¹, Chao Zou¹, Mengyue He¹, Wensha Guo¹, Yiu-Cho Chung¹, Xin Liu¹

Accuracy of PRF shift based MR thermometry is prone to motion and temporal field change and several referenceless thermometry methods have been proposed to address these issues. However, the accuracies of these methods and their relevance to real time temperature monitoring have not been evaluated. We compared the performance of the six referenceless methods proposed in terms of temperature accuracy and computational requirements. We found that the phase finite difference method and the near harmonic method outperform others in temperature accuracy, and methods that do not require phase unwrapping are generally more computationally efficient.