Image reconstruction method based on phased array coil sensitivity estimation in parallel MRI

Parallel Magnetic Resonance Imaging (PMRI) has become a powerful technique to speed up magnetic resonance data acquisition by multiple phased array coils in recent years. The coil sensitivity is a significant factor in the MRI image reconstruction, however it is generally unknown in advance, therefore how to estimate the coil sensitivity accurately is an important research issue. This paper presents a new image reconstruction algorithm, which mainly uses smoothing filter to estimate the phased array coil sensitivity. The research results show that compared with the conventional Sum-of-Square (SOS) algorithm, this approach can reduce the signal bias, improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and increase the contrast of the reconstructed MRI image. The effectiveness and accuracy of this method have been proved through the simulation experiments.