Estimating the Coil Sensitivity Maps from the Surface Images in Parallel Imaging

Directly from the surface coil images, a new adaptive smoothing method for estimating the surface coil sensitivity is proposed in this paper. When the coil sensitivity maps estimated by this method are applied to reconstruct the full Field-Of-View image from the under-sampled images, the quality of the reconstructed image in parallel magnetic resonance imaging is improved. As a result, without using the body coil for additional reference scans, the proposed method is valuable for determining the coil sensitivity maps alone from the receive coil surface images. Furthermore, the study innovatively poses that the relatively distinct coil sensitivity maps could be utilized to reconstruct full Field-Of-View image in aim of speed-up magnetic resonance imaging.