On estimation of bias field in MRI images: polynomial vs Gaussian surface fitting method
Sayan Kahali, Sudip Kumar Adhikari, Jamuna Kanta Sing · Journal of Chemometrics · 2016
Surface fitting is one of the well‐known retrospective methods for bias field estimation from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images. Bias field in MRI images is primarily caused because of radio frequency–coil nonuniformity, improper image acquisition process, patient movement, and so on. The bias field can be characterized by any slow variant and smooth function because of its slow variant nature. In this paper, we present a comparative study between polynomial and Gaussian surface fitting methods. In particular, we have used both the second‐ and third‐order polynomial functions to estimate the bias field. In this study, we approximate the bias field in two different ways. In the first method, the surfaces are fitted on the anatomical tissue regions individually and then fused to estimate the bias field. Conversely, in the second method, we have done the same over the entire image region. We have tested on three volumes of simulated and one volume of real‐patient MRI brain images and validated the results by both the qualitative and quantitative analyses. The quantitative analyses are presented in standard deviation and coefficient of joint variation. The analysis of the simulation results show that the Gaussian surface fitting method yields better results in both the cases, where the surface fitting is done on entire image and individual tissue regions.