A New Method for Data Acquisition and Image Reconstruction in Parallel Magnetic Resonance Imaging

We propose a novel data acquisition and image reconstruction method for parallel magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The proposed method improves the GRAPPA (Generalized Auto-calibrating Partially Parallel Acquisitions) method by simultaneously collecting data using the body coil in addition to localized surface coils. The body coil data is included in the GRAPPA reconstruction as an additional coil. The reconstructed body coil image shows greater uniformity over the field of view than the conventional sum-of-squares reconstruction that is conventionally used with GRAPPA. The body coil image can also be used to correct for spatial inhomogeneity in the sum-of-squares image. The proposed method is tested using numerical and real MRI phantom data.