Divergence-Free Constrained Phase Unwrapping and Denoising for 4D Flow MRI Using Weighted Least-Squares

A novel divergence-free constrained phase unwrapping method was proposed and evaluated for 4D flow MRI. The unwrapped phase field was obtained by integrating the phase variations estimated from the wrapped phase data using weighted least-squares. The divergence-free constraint for incompressible blood flow was incorporated to regulate and denoise the resulting phase field. The proposed method was ...