A Method for Estimating the Coil Sensitivity Maps from the Surface Images in Parallel Imaging

Derived from the individual surface coil images, a new method based on anisotropic diffusion for estimating the coil sensitivity is proposed in this paper. When the coil sensitivity maps estimated by this method are applied to reconstruct the magnetic resonance image from the under-sampled images by parallel imaging reconstruction Sensitivity Encoding method, the quality of the reconstructed image 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 surface coil images.