A dual image approach for bias field correction in magnetic resonance imaging

In this paper, we propose a dual image approach to correcting intensity inhomogeneities for MR images acquired using surface coils. Previous methods are usually not satisfactory due to restricted application domains, considerable human interactions, or some undesirable artifacts. The proposed algorithm provides nice correction results for a variety of surface-coil MR images. It is accomplished by using an additional body-coil MR image of a smaller size captured at the same position as that of the surface-coil image to facilitate the estimation of the bias field function. The correction algorithm consists of aligning the surface-coil image with the body-coil image and fitting a spline surface from a sparse set of data points for the associated bias field function. Experiments on some real images show satisfactory correction results by using the proposed algorithm. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.