TITLE:
Phase Unwrapping in Magnetic Resonance Elastography
AUTHORS:
Surendra Maharjan, Tomokazu Numano, Tetsushi Habe, Daiki Ito, Takamichi Ueki, Keisuke Igarashi, Toshiki Maeno
KEYWORDS:
Phase Unwrapping, Magnetic Resonance Elastography, Minimum Discontinuity, Laplacian-Based Estimate, Region Growing, Dilate-Erode Propagate
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Medical Imaging,
Vol.8 No.4,
December
28,
2018
ABSTRACT: Phase Unwrapping (PU) is an ill-posed problem in
Magnetic Resonance Elastography (MRE). The phase information is not usable
until the phases are retrieved by using PU algorithms. In this present study,
we attempt to determine the ideal PU method for MRE using both phantom and
volunteer psoas major (PM) muscle images. All the MRE experiments were carried
out in Philips MRI (Achieva 3.0 T, Best, The Netherlands). A multi-echo
gradient-echo MRE pulse sequence was employed and the four PU methods were
considered based on their easy user platform. They are namely, Minimum
Discontinuity (MD), Laplacian-Based Estimate (LBE), Region Growing (RG) and
Dilate-Erode (DE) Propagate. Phantom images were successfully unwrapped by all
four methods, whereas MD and LBE could only unwrap PM muscle images properly.
RG and DE failed to unwrap the PM muscle images.