Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 475745, 9 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/475745
Research Article

A New Particle Swarm Optimization-Based Method for Phase Unwrapping of MRI Data

Wei He,1 Yiyuan Cheng,1 Ling Xia,1 and Feng Liu2

1Department of Biomedical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China
2School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia

Received 31 May 2012; Accepted 30 July 2012

Academic Editor: Huafeng Liu

Copyright © 2012 Wei He et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

A new method based on discrete particle swarm optimization (dPSO) algorithm is proposed to solve the branch-cut phase unwrapping problem of MRI data. In this method, the optimal order of matching the positive residues with the negative residues is first identified by the dPSO algorithm, then the branch cuts are placed to join each pair of the opposite polarity residues, and in the last step phases are unwrapped by flood-fill algorithm. The performance of the proposed algorithm was tested on both simulated phase image and MRI wrapped phase data sets. The results demonstrated that, compared with conventionally used branch-cut phase unwrapping algorithms, the dPSO algorithm is rather robust and effective.