More and more medical devices can capture different features of human body and form three dimensional (3D) images. In clinical applications, usually it is required to fuse multiple source images containing different and crucial information into one for the purpose of assisting medical treatment. However, traditional image fusion methods are normally designed for two dimensional (2D) images and will lead to loss of the third dimensional information if directly applied to 3D data. Therefore, a novel 3D magnetic image fusion method was proposed based on the combination of newly invented beyond wavelet transform, called 3D band limited shearlet transformand (BLST), and four groups of traditional fusion rules. The proposed method was then compared with the 2D and 3D wavelet and dual-tree complex wavelet transform fusion methods through 4 groups of human brain T2* and quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) images. The experiments indicated that the performance of the method based on 3D transform was generally superior to the existing methods based on 2D transform. Taking advantage of direction representation, shearlet transform could effectively improve the performance of conventional fusion method based on 3D transform. It is well concluded, therefore, that the proposed method is the best among the methods based on 2D and 3D transforms.
Magnetic susceptibility is an intrinsic physical quantity which describes the relationship between material magnetization and applied external magnetic field. Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) is an MRI technology which can quantify the buck magnetic susceptibility of tissue in vivo. It is particularly effective at elucidating anatomy with paramagnetic or diamagnetic components. QSM technology is a method for solving the ill-pose problem of un-conventional de-convolution of the measured tissue magnetic field with the unit magnetic dipole field to obtain the susceptibility source map. Many multi orientation scan based QSM and clinically acceptable single orientation QSM methods have been proposed to solve this ill-posed problem. In this paper, the QSM concept is introduced and the various QSM methods are systematically categorized and discussed. The aim of this paper is to summarize the current research progress of QSM, popularize the knowledge of QSM and promote the improvements and the rational application of QSM in clinical field.
Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) can provide tissue susceptibility information and has been adapted for clinical research and diagnosis. QSM of monkey brain in vivo at 9.4 T has not been demonstrated so far. In this study 9.4 T in vivo monkey brain QSM was performed with 200 μm isotropic high-resolution. It was found that the inherent singularity problem for QSM diverged significantly at ultra-high image resolution during regularization process and resulted in severe image artifacts. The K-space division (TKD) was applied to eliminate the artifacts, with an optimal threshold level between 0.2 and 0.3. High resolution QSM of monkey brain in vivo can thus provide a novel tool for brain research.
To assess the background field removal method usually used in quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM), and to analyze the cause of serious artifacts generated in the truncated k-space division (TKD) method, this paper discusses a variety of background field removal methods and proposes an improved method to suppress the artifacts of susceptibility inversion. Firstly, we scanned phase images with the gradient echo sequence and then compared the quality and the speed of reconstructed images of sophisticated harmonic artifact reduction for phase data (SHARP), regularization enable of SHARP (RESHARP) and laplacian boundary value (LBV) methods. Secondly, we analyzed the reasons for reconstruction artifacts caused by the multiple truncations and discontinuity of the TKD method, and an improved TKD method was proposed by increasing threshold truncation range and improving data continuity. Finally, the result of susceptibility inversion from the improved and original TKD method was compared. The results show that the reconstruction of SHARP and RESHARP are very fast, but SHARP reconstruction artifacts are serious and the reconstruction precision is not high and implementation of RESHARP is complicated. The reconstruction speed of LBV method is slow, but the detail of the reconstructed image is prominent and the precision is high. In the QSM inversion methods, the reconstruction artifact of the original TKD method is serious, while the improved method obtains good artifact suppression image and good inversion result of artifact regions.