Novel Method for Background Phase Removal on MRI Proton Resonance Frequency Measurements

MR images have a magnitude and a phase, but in almost all clinical applications only the magnitude images are used, because the phase images have a smooth but strong background signal that masks useful information. The phase contains information such as the temperature during thermal ablation, and the iron content of brain tissue. We describe a novel method to suppress the background that is based on higher order edge detection and sparse image representation.