Coherence enhancement in quantitative susceptibility mapping by means of anisotropic weighting in morphology enabled dipole inversion

Purpose: To investigate an anisotropic structural prior in morphology enabled dipole inversion (MEDI) for improving accuracy in quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM). Theory and Methods: Anisotropic weighting (AW) was devised and implemented to incorporate orientation information into the edge agreement in the MEDI method. AW performance was compared with isotropic weighting by testing and validating on in vivo brain multiple orientation MRI data using COSMOS and the (33) component of the susceptibility tensor as reference. Results: Suppressing streaking artifacts, AW improved not only QSM image quality but also accuracy in terms of RMSE (root mean square error), HFEN (high frequency error norm), SSIM (structural similarity index), and GDA (gradient direction agreement). In addition, it outperformed isotropic weighting in region of interest-based analysis. From a computational perspective, AW was as fast as isotropic weighting, taking approximately the same central processing unit times. Conclusion: Using AW in MEDI improves QSM accuracy compared with isotropic weighting. Magn Reson Med 79:1172–1180, 2018.