Deformable mosaicing for whole-body MRI

Abstract

Whole-body magnetic resonance imaging is an emerging application gaining vast clinical interest during the last years. Although recent technological advances shortened the longish acquisition time, this is still the limiting factor avoiding its wide-spread clinical usage. The acquisition of images with large field-of-view helps to relieve this drawback, but leads to significantly distorted images. Therefore, we propose a deformable mosaicing approach, based on the simultaneous registration to linear weighted averages, to correct for distortions in the overlapping area. This method produces good results on in-vivo data and has the advantage that a seamless integration into the clinical workflow is possible. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.