Restoration of Bi-contrast Whole Body MRI for Discontinuous Intensity Nonuniformities

Motivation: Whole-body MRI, a screening tool for bone metastatic disease, uses parallel coil imaging to cover a large Field of View. Signal inhomogeneities at the coil junction points create jump discontinuities in the signal intensity with a negative effect on serial image stitching. Goal(s): To correct for signal jump discontinuities between coils using computer vision. Approach: We engaged piecewise smooth intensity nonuniformities fields using anisotropic diffusion and quantified for improvement in image entropy (H). Results: Our algorithm smoothens the signal intensity between parallel coils by 8% based on entropy metrics. Impact: We implement a novel non-parametric methodology with piecewise smoothness to improve intensity non-uniformities between parallel coil images in whole-body MRI (WB-MRI). Optimized whole-body stitched images render WB-MRI into a one-stop-shop staging method.