A comparison of phase unwrapping methods in velocity-encoded MRI for aortic flows

Purpose: The phase of a MRI signal is used to encode the velocity of blood flow. Phase unwrapping artifacts may appear when aiming to improve the velocity-to-noise ratio (VNR) of the measured velocity field. This study aims to compare various unwrapping algorithms on ground-truth synthetic data generated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. Methods: We compare four different phase unwrapping algorithms on two different synthetic datasets of four-dimensional flow MRI and 26 datasets of 2D PC-MRI acquisitions including the ascending and descending aorta. The synthetic datasets are constructed using CFD simulations of an aorta with a coarctation, with different levels of spatiotemporal resolutions and noise. The error of the unwrapped images was assessed by comparison against the ground truth velocity field in the synthetic data and dual-VENC reconstructions in the in vivo data. Results: Using the unwrapping algorithms, we were able to remove aliased voxels in the data almost entirely, reducing the L2-error compared to the ground truth by 50%–80%. Results indicated that the best choice of algorithm depend on the spatiotemporal resolution and noise level of the dataset. Temporal unwrapping is most successful with a high temporal and low spatial resolution ((Figure presented.) ms, (Figure presented.) mm), reducing the L2-error by 70%–85%, while Laplacian unwrapping performs better with a lower temporal or better spatial resolution ((Figure presented.) ms, (Figure presented.) mm), especially for signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) 12 as opposed to SNR 15, with an error reduction of 55%–85% compared to the 50%–75% achieved by the Temporal method. The differences in performance between the methods are statistically significant. Conclusions: The temporal method and spatiotemporal Laplacian method provide the best results, with the spatiotemporal Laplacian being more robust. However, single- (Figure presented.) methods only situationally and not generally reach the performance of dual- (Figure presented.) unwrapping methods.