Maria Kuklisova Murgasova1, Georgia Lockwood Estrin1, Rita G. Nunes1,2, Mary Rutherford1, and Jo Hajnal1
1King's College London, London, United Kingdom, 2Instituto de Biofisica e Engenharia Biomedica, Faculdade de Ciencias, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
We present a novel method for
correction of geometric distortions induced by static B0 field in fetal EPI. The
method estimates distortion by including
a distortion-correction step in the slice to volume reconstruction of orthogonal
EPI stacks with orthogonal phase encoding directions, in the form of non-rigid
registration with a Laplacian constraint. We show that the proposed method achieves
better consistency with reconstructed ssFSE volumes than EPI volumes constructed
from data corrected by B0 field map. The
registration-based distortion correction is thus a viable alternative to
acquisition of B0 field map.
