Intensity inhomogeneity correction in clinical pediatric spinal cord MRI images

Intensity inhomogeneity correction is one of the challenges in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Correction of intensity inhomogeneity for spinal cord images is more difficult than brain images because of the small size of homogeneous regions such as gray and white matter structures in a spinal cord. In this paper we present a pixel based correction method called Improved Adaptive Gamma Correction Method (IAGCM). Several qualitative and quantitative evaluations were tested on spinal cord images on seven healthy and three subjects with spinal cord injury. Contrast to Noise Ratio (CNR) and Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) for different parameters of “p” were considered as quantitative evaluation. Qualitative evaluations were performed by scoring of images by an independent board certified neuroradiologist on images applied with pseudo color transformation. Overall the results showed improvement in the CNR of the corrected images. In conclusion, the proposed IAGCM method is a simple method to implement and performed well in improving the image quality of spinal cord images.