Noise estimation in parallel MRI: GRAPPA and SENSE

Parallel imaging methods allow to increase the acquisition rate via subsampled acquisitions of the k-space. SENSE and GRAPPA are the most popular reconstruction methods proposed in order to suppress the artifacts created by this subsampling. The reconstruction process carried out by both methods yields to a variance of noise value which is dependent on the position within the final image. Hence, the traditional noise estimation methods - based on a single noise level for the whole image - fail. In this paper we propose a novel methodology to estimate the spatial dependent pattern of the variance of noise in SENSE and GRAPPA reconstructed images. In both cases, some additional information must be known beforehand: the sensitivity maps of each receiver coil in the SENSE case and the reconstruction coefficients for GRAPPA.