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Abstract #2496

Background Field Removal Based on Local Complex Phase Unwrapping and Spherical Mean Value Property

Saifeng Liu1, Sagar Buch1, Ewart Mark Haacke1, 2

1School of Biomedical Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada; 2Department of Radiology, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, United States


The quality of Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM) relies on the accuracy in background field removal. In the SHARP method, phase unwrapping is generally required, which is usually a time-consuming procedure. It could be avoided by using the Laplacian of the field but there are errors in regions with sharp phase changes. Besides, using the Laplacian may lead to reduced accuracy in the processed phase images. We proposed a method which allows for using an optimal kernel size without explicit phase unwrapping. This helps to reduce the processing time and improve the accuracy in background field removal using SHARP.