Quantitative assessment of the parallel MRI reconstruction using background noise uniformity

The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between the background noise uniformity of the GRAPPA reconstructed image and the root mean square (RMS) error of this reconstructed image with respect to the reference image. The method to evaluate the background noise uniformity of the image reconstructed from the partially sampled k-space data was also proposed and performed. The parameter value of the background noise uniformity of the GRAPPA reconstructed image was found to be approximately proportional to the RMS error of the same reconstructed image. This relationship mentioned above was then applied as the criteria to select the best image automatically by a software program from a number of reconstruction images which were obtained with different GRAPPA kernel configurations.