Intensity Inhomogeneity Correction in Human Brain Imaging at 7 Tesla using SPM 8

PURPOSE: Recent advancement of ultra-high field MRI has enabled the use of 7 Tesla (T) MRI for clinical research, which offers several advantages compared to conventional clinical MRI (3.0 Tesla and below), such as higher signal-to-noise ratio, higher spatial resolution, and enhanced susceptibility effects. However, signal intensity variation or inhomogeneity are remarkable at 7T due to main magnetic field (B0) and RF field (B1) inhomogeneity, susceptibility effects, and inhomogeneous coil sensitivity. Although various techniques have been proposed to correct the signal inhomogeneity, these methods have not been validated at 7T. Therefore, we tested a post-processing technique available with SPM8 (http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/), for signal intensity correction of various scan using 7T MRI.