ABSTRACTPurposeTo develop a rapid and accurate MRI phase unwrapping technique for challenging phase topographies encountered at high magnetic fields, around metal implants or post-operative cavities, that is sufficiently fast to be applied to large group studies including Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping and functional MRI (with phase-based distortion correction).MethodsThe proposed path-following phase unwrapping algorithm, ROMEO, estimates the coherence of the signal both in space - using MRI magnitude and phase information - and over time, assuming approximately linear temporal phase evolution. This information is combined to form a quality map that guides the unwrapping along a three-dimensional path through the object using a computationally efficient minimum spanning tree algorithm. ROMEO was tested against the two most commonly used exact phase unwrapping methods: PRELUDE and BEST PATH in simulated topographies and at several field strengths: in 3 T and 7 T in vivo human head images and 9.4 T ex vivo rat head images.ResultsROMEO was more reliable than PRELUDE and BEST PATH, yielding unwrapping results with excellent temporal stability for multi-echo or multi-time-point data. ROMEO does not require image masking and delivers results within seconds even in large, highly wrapped multi-echo datasets (e.g. 9 seconds for a 7 T head dataset with 31 echoes and a 208 x 208 x 96 matrix size).ConclusionOverall, ROMEO was both faster and more accurate than PRELUDE and BEST PATH delivering exact results within seconds, which is well below typical image acquisition times, enabling potential on-console application.
Phase unwrapping with a rapid opensource minimum spanning tree algorithm (ROMEO)
