| Summary: | Electrical properties provide essential information for cancer detection and specific absorption rate (SAR) estimation. Magnetic resonance electrical properties tomography (MREPT) is an approach to retrieve the distribution of electrical properties. The conventional method suffers from the locally homogeneous assumption and amplification of noise. In this study, a novel approach was introduced to improve the accuracy and the noise robustness of conductivity imaging. The proposed approach reformulated the central equation of the gradient-based method to avoid the calculation of the Laplacian operator. The equation was regularized using the second-order total generalized variation, which formulates an objective function. The optimization problem was solved by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) method. The proposed method was validated by the simulation data of the cylindrical phantom and Ella head model, and the performance was compared with existing methods. The results demonstrated that the proposed method reconstructed an accurate conductivity image and alleviated the noise effects. Furthermore, phantom and healthy volunteer experiments were implemented at a 3 Tesla (T) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. The results suggested that the developed method can provide solutions for improved conductivity reconstruction and show potential for clinical application.
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