Improved MRSI with Field Inhomogeneity Compensation

Magnetic resonance spectroscopy imaging (MRSI) is a promising and developing tool in medical imaging. Because of various difficulties imposed by the imperfections of the scanner and the reconstruction algorithms, its applicability in clinical practice is rather limited. In this paper, we suggest an extension of the constrained reconstruction technique (SLIM). Our algorithm, named B-SLIM, takes into account the the measured field inhomogeneity map, which contains both the scanner's main field inhomogeneity and the object-dependent magnetic susceptibility effects. The method is implemented and tested both with synthetic and physical two-compartment phantom data. The results demonstrate significant performance improvement over the SLIM technique. At the same time, the algorithm has the same computational complexity as SLIM.