Low resolution image data from a whole-body coil (18) and each coil element (20.sub.1, 20.sub.2, . . . 20.sub.n) of a parallel imaging coil are received in a memory or buffer (34). A reconstruction processor (36) reconstructs the low resolution whole-body coil data and the low resolution data from each of the coil elements into corresponding low resolution images (38). The low resolution from each coil element is divided (42) by the low resolution image from the whole-body coil to generate a corresponding sensitivity map (44.sub.1, 44.sub.2, . . . 44.sub.n) for each of the coil elements. In areas where the low resolution body coil image has near-zero values or in areas where the values in the body coil or receive coil images are changing very rapidly, the sensitivity maps have defects. A sensitivity map or correction circuit or algorithm (50) determines regions of the sensitivity maps which are defective and interpolates/extrapolates adjacent portions of the sensitivity maps in accordance with (a) a coil geometry map (56) and (b) a wave-propagation model (58) to correct the defective regions, to propagate them into the outer regions of the field of view or to fully replace the measured sensitivity map and create a corrected sensitivity map for each coil element.