Sinogram-based coil selection for streak artifact reduction in undersampled radial real-time magnetic resonance imaging.

BACKGROUND: Streak artifacts are a common problem in radial magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We therefore developed a method for automatically excluding receiver coil elements which lead to these artifacts.

METHODS: The proposed coil selection relates to real-time MRI data based on highly undersampled radial acquisitions. It exploits differences between high- and low-resolution sinograms reconstructed from datasets acquired during preparatory scans. Apart from phantom validations, the performance was assessed for real-time MRI studies of different human organ systems in vivo.

RESULTS: The algorithm greatly reduces streak artifact strength without compromising image quality in other parts of the image. It is robust with respect to different experimental settings and fast to be included in the online reconstruction pipeline for real-time MRI.

CONCLUSIONS: The proposed method enables a fast reduction of streak artifacts in radial real-time MRI.