Efficient Correction of Inhomogeneous Static Magnetic Field-Induced Distortion in Echo Planar Imaging

By Dominic Holland, J. Kuperman, A. M. Dale. NeuroImage, 2009

479 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Single-shot Echo Planar Imaging (EPI) is one of the most efficient magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) acquisition schemes, producing relatively high-definition images in 100 ms or less. These qualities make it desirable for Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI), functional MRI (fMRI), and Dynamic Susceptibility Contrast MRI (DSC-MRI). However, EPI suffers from severe spatial and intensity distortion due to B0 field inhomogeneity induced by magnetic susceptibility variations. Anatomically accurate, undistorted images are essential for relating DTI and fMRI images with anatomical MRI scans, and for spatial registration with other modalities. We present here a fast, robust, and accurate procedure for correcting EPI images from such spatial and intensity distortions. The method involves acquisition of scans with opposite phase encoding polarities, resulting in opposite spatial distortion patterns, and alignment of the resulting images using a fast nonlinear registration procedure. We show that this method, requiring minimal additional scan time, provides superior accuracy relative to the more commonly used, and more time consuming, field mapping approach. This method is also highly computationally efficient, allowing for direct ‘real-time’ implementation on the MRI scanner. We further demonstrate that the proposed method can be used to recover dropouts in gradient echo (BOLD and DSC-MRI) EPI images.

Subfields: Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0352992152a86e7c03058d9d072167389e055d07

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In Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

Citations in the corpus

Anatomically-constrained tractography: Improved diffusion MRI streamlines tractography through effective use of anatomical information (2012, methodology): “For this purpose we used a recently-proposed EPI distortion correction procedure (Holland et al., 2010), which estimates the spatially-varying inhomogeneity of the main magnetic field from a pair of b=0 images with the direction of acquisition along the PE direction reversed.”
SIFT: Spherical-deconvolution informed filtering of tractograms (2013, methodology): “…the second spatial derivative of the inhomogeneity field was regularised to enforce a smoothly-varying solution; in our experience, regularisation of the first derivative of this field (as in (Holland et al., 2010)) can lead to residual image misalignment in areas of large field perturbation.”
The impact of T1 vs EPI spatial normalization templates for fMRI data analyses (2017, methodology): “A reliance on distortion correction pulse sequences, while attractive as it offers a physics-based approach for reducing distortions [Jezzard and Balaban, 1995; Holland et al., 2010], suffers from some limitations as well.”
Methods for cleaning the BOLD fMRI signal (2016, unknown): “, 2008), or based on two acquisitions with reversed phaseencoding directions (Andersson et al., 2003; Bowtell et al., 1994; Chang and Fitzpatrick, 1992; Holland et al., 2010).”
The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study: Imaging acquisition across 21 sites (2018, unknown): “The high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) scan, with multiple b-values, and fast integrated B 0 distortion correction (Reversed polarity gradient (RPG) method, Holland et al., 2009; Treiber et al., 2016), is acquired for segmentation of white matter tracts and measurement of diffusion.”