MR-based electrical property tomography using a modified finite difference scheme

作者:Liu, Chunyi; Jin, Jin; Guo, Lei; Li, Mingyan; Tesiram, Yasvir; Chen, Haiwei; Liu, Feng*; Xin, Xuegang*; Crozier, Stuart
来源:Physics in Medicine and Biology, 2018, 63(14): 145013.
DOI:10.1088/1361-6560/aacc35

摘要

Magnetic resonance electrical property tomography (MR-EPT) reconstructs electrical properties (EPs) from measured magnetic fields in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems. In this study, an MR-EPT method was proposed that utilized a new finite difference approximation of the involved differential wave equation. Compared with existing MR-EPT approaches, the construction of the system matrix involves applying the first derivative twice based on a larger number of neighbouring finite-difference grids, which is different from a standard Laplacian operator on a regular grid structure, leading to a better conditioned linear inverse problem. With improved noise robustness, more faithful EPs can be obtained by the proposed method, particularly at tissue boundaries and regions with a poorly measured magnetic field (low signal-to-noise ratio). Numerical simulations with a specially designed multi-slice phantom and an anatomically accurate head model (Duke) have demonstrated that the proposed method can provide a more faithful reconstruction of EPs compared to existing methods, which usually offer unreliable solutions associated with traditional finite difference approximation of the central wave equation and unrealistic assumptions. Experiments on a 9.4 T MRI system have been conducted to validate the simulations.