Seeking a Widely Adoptable Practical Standard to Estimate Signal‐to‐Noise Ratio in Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Multiple‐Coil Reconstructions

BACKGROUND: Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is used to evaluate the performance of magnetic resonance (MR) imaging systems. Accurate and consistent estimations are needed to routinely use SNR to assess coils and image reconstruction techniques. PURPOSE: To identify a reliable and practical method for SNR estimation in multiple-coil reconstructions. STUDY TYPE: Technical evaluation and comparison. SUBJECTS/PHANTOM: A uniform phantom and four healthy volunteers: 35, 38, 39 y/o males, 25 y/o female. FIELD STRENGTH/SEQUENCE: Two-dimensional multislice gradient-echo pulse sequence at 3 T and 7 T. ASSESSMENT: Reference-standard SNR was calculated from 100 multiple replicas. Six SNR methods were compared against it: difference image (DI), analytic array combination (AC), pseudo-multiple-replica (PMR), generalized pseudo-replica (GPR), smoothed image subtraction (SIS), and DI with temporal instability correction (TIC). The assessment was repeated for different multiple-coil reconstructions. STATISTICAL TESTS: SNR methods were evaluated in terms of relative deviation (RD) and normalized mutual information (NMI) with respect to the reference-standard, using a linear regression (0.05 significance level) to assess how different factors affect accuracy. RESULTS: Average RD (phantom) for DI, AC, PMR, GPR, SIS, and TIC was 7.9%, 6%, 6.7%, 10.1%, 40%, and 14.6%, respectively. RD increased with acceleration. SNR maps with AC were the most similar to the reference standard (NMI = 0.358). Considering all brain regions of interest, average RD for all SNR methods varied 96% among volunteers but remained approximately 10% for AC, PMR, and GPR, whereas it was more than 30% for DI, SIS, and TIC. RD was mainly affected by image reconstruction (beta = 12) for AC and SNR entropy for SIS (beta = 19). DATA CONCLUSION: AC provided accurate and robust SNR estimation. PMR and GPR are more generally applicable than AC. DI and TIC should be used only at low acceleration factors, when an additional noise-only scan cannot be acquired. SIS is a single-acquisition alternative to DI for generalized autocalibrating partial parallel acquisition (GRAPPA) reconstructions. EVIDENCE LEVEL: 1 TECHNICAL EFFICACY: Stage 1.