Intensity inhomogeneity is considered as an inherent artifact in magnetic resonance images and is prominent in high‐field strength scanners. An effective and conceptually simple retrospective correction technique is introduced in this article that implements a compensation function based on spatially constrained fuzzy c‐means clustering to reduce the effect of intensity inhomogeneity. Intensity compensation functions are estimated on each clustered region and are subsequently processed with an anisotropic diffusion strategy. The proposed approach does not require any parametric models or prior knowledge on the acquisition process for the intensity inhomogeneity correction. The proposed diffusion based technique was evaluated on simulated and real data sets and the results were compared with some of the prominent correction methods. The quantitative analyses in terms of coefficient of variation and coefficient of joint variation ensure the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. The experimental analyses of the results show that the proposed methodology outperforms the state‐of‐the‐art approaches.

中文翻译：

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基于扩散的补偿方法可校正MRI中的强度不均匀性

强度不均匀性被认为是磁共振图像中固有的伪像，在高场强扫描仪中尤为突出。本文介绍了一种有效且概念上简单的追溯校正技术，该技术基于空间约束的模糊c均值聚类来实现补偿功能，以减少强度不均匀性的影响。在每个聚类区域上估计强度补偿函数，然后使用各向异性扩散策略对其进行处理。所提出的方法不需要任何参数模型或关于强度不均匀校正的采集过程的先验知识。拟议的基于扩散的技术在模拟和真实数据集上进行了评估，并将结果与​​一些著名的校正方法进行了比较。根据变异系数和联合变异系数进行的定量分析确保了所提出方法的有效性。结果的实验​​分析表明，所提出的方法要优于最新方法。