Multi-scale graph-cut algorithm for efficient water-fat separation

作者：Berglund Johan^*; Skorpil Mikael

来源：Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, 2017, 78(3): 941-949.

DOI：10.1002/mrm.26479

• chemical shift imaging
• Dixon
• fat suppression
• graph cuts
• multi-scale processing
• water-fat separation

PurposeTo improve the accuracy and robustness to noise in water-fat separation by unifying the multiscale and graph cut based approaches to B-0-correction.
MethodsA previously proposed water-fat separation algorithm that corrects for B-0 field inhomogeneity in 3D by a single quadratic pseudo-Boolean optimization (QPBO) graph cut was incorporated into a multi-scale framework, where field map solutions are propagated from coarse to fine scales for voxels that are not resolved by the graph cut. The accuracy of the single-scale and multi-scale QPBO algorithms was evaluated against benchmark reference datasets. The robustness to noise was evaluated by adding noise to the input data prior to water-fat separation.
ResultsBoth algorithms achieved the highest accuracy when compared with seven previously published methods, while computation times were acceptable for implementation in clinical routine. The multi-scale algorithm was more robust to noise than the single-scale algorithm, while causing only a small increase (+10%) of the reconstruction time.
ConclusionThe proposed 3D multi-scale QPBO algorithm offers accurate water-fat separation, robustness to noise, and fast reconstruction. The software implementation is freely available to the research community. Magn Reson Med 78:941-949, 2017.

• 出版日期2017-9