Phantom evaluation of electrical conductivity mapping by MRI: Comparison to vector network analyzer measurements and spatial resolution assessment

Abstract

AbstractPurposeTo evaluate the performance of various MR electrical properties tomography (MR‐EPT) methods at 3 T in terms of absolute quantification and spatial resolution limit for electrical conductivity.MethodsAbsolute quantification as well as spatial resolution performance were evaluated on homogeneous phantoms and a phantom with holes of different sizes, respectively. Ground‐truth conductivities were measured with an open‐ended coaxial probe connected to a vector network analyzer (VNA). Four widely used MR‐EPT reconstruction methods were investigated: phase‐based Helmholtz (PB), phase‐based convection‐reaction (PB‐cr), image‐based (IB), and generalized‐image‐based (GIB). These methods were compared using the same complex images from a 1 mm‐isotropic UTE sequence. Alternative transceive phase acquisition sequences were also compared in PB and PB‐cr.ResultsIn large homogeneous phantoms, all methods showed a strong correlation with ground truth conductivities (r > 0.99); however, GIB was the best in terms of accuracy, spatial uniformity, and robustness to boundary artifacts. In the resolution phantom, the normalized root‐mean‐squared error of all methods grew rapidly (>0.40) when the hole size was below 10 mm, with simplified methods (PB and IB), or below 5 mm, with generalized methods (PB‐cr and GIB).ConclusionVNA measurements are essential to assess the accuracy of MR‐EPT. In this study, all tested MR‐EPT methods correlated strongly with the VNA measurements. The UTE sequence is recommended for MR‐EPT, with the GIB method providing good accuracy for structures down to 5 mm. Structures below 5 mm may still be detected in the conductivity maps, but with significantly lower accuracy.