Evaluation of EPI distortion correction methods for quantitative MRI of the brain at high magnetic field

摘要: High field MRI has been applied to high-resolution structural and functional imaging of the brain. Echo planar (EPI) is an ultrafast acquisition technique widely used in diffusion imaging, perfusion imaging. However, it suffers from geometric intensity distortions caused by static magnetic inhomogeneity, which worse at higher strengths. Such susceptibility artifacts are particularly severe relation small size mouse In this study we compared different distortion correction methods, including nonlinear registration, map-based, reversed phase-encoding-based approaches, on quantitative T1 brain acquired spin-echo EPI with inversion recovery pseudo-continuous arterial spin labeling, respectively, 7 T. Our results showed that 3D phase-encoding outperformed other methods terms fidelity, conventional map-based could be improved combination affine transformation reduce bias map. Both quantification smaller fitting error regional variation. These approaches offer robust high strengths hence lead more accurate co-registration biomarkers both clinical preclinical applications.