An iterative method for coil sensitivity estimation in multi-coil MRI systems

This paper presents an iterative coil sensitivity estimation method for multi-coil MRI systems. The proposed method works with coil images in the magnitude image domain. It determines a region of support (RoS), a region being composed of the same type of tissues, by a region growing algorithm, which makes use of both intensities and intensity gradients of pixels. By repeating this procedure, it can determine multiple regions of support, which together cover most of the concerned image area. The union of these regions of support provides a rough estimate of the sensitivity of each coil through dividing the intensities of pixels by the average intensity inside every region of support. The obtained rough coil sensitivity estimate is further approached with the product of multiple low-order polynomials, rather than a single one. The product of these polynomials provides a smooth estimate of the sensitivity of each coil. With the obtained sensitivities of coils, it can produce a better reconstructed image, which determines more correct regions of support and yields preciser estimates of the sensitivities of coils. In other words, the method can be iteratively implemented to improve the estimation performance. The proposed method was verified through both simulated data and clinical data from different body parts. The experimental results confirm the superiority of our method to some conventional methods.