Purpose: To quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the water-signal performance of the consistent intensity inhomogeneity correction (CIIC) method to correct for intensity inhomogeneities
Methods: Water-fat volumes were acquired using 1.5 Tesla (T) and 3.0T symmetrically sampled 2-point Dixon three-dimensional MRI. Two datasets: (i) 10 muscle tissue regions of interest (ROIs) from 10 subjects acquired with both 1.5T and 3.0T whole-body MRI. (ii) Seven liver tissue ROIs from 36 patients imaged using 1.5T MRI at six time points after Gd-EOB-DTPA injection. The performance of CIIC was evaluated quantitatively by analyzing its impact on the dispersion and bias of the water image ROI intensities, and qualitatively using side-by-side image comparisons.
Results: CIIC significantly ( P1.5T≤2.3×10-4,P3.0T≤1.0×10-6) decreased the nonphysiological intensity variance while preserving the average intensity levels. The side-by-side comparisons showed improved intensity consistency ( Pint≤10-6) while not introducing artifacts ( Part=0.024) nor changed appearances ( Papp≤10-6).
Conclusion: CIIC improves the spatiotemporal intensity consistency in regions of a homogenous tissue type.
Keywords: Dixon imaging; fat quantification; inhomogeneity correction; intensity correction; water; water-fat imaging.
© 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.