A Novel Algorithm for the Correction of Eddy Current Distortion in Diffusion Weighted Imaging Data

Wei Liu^1,2, Guang Yang¹, Zhenyu Zhou², Yongdi Zhou¹, Gengying Li¹, Bradley S. Peterson², Dongrong Xu^1,2

A novel approach is proposed for the correction of eddy-current distortion in diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) data acquired using an echo-planar imaging sequence. Our method offers improvement over the commonly used Iterative Cross-Correlation (ICC) algorithm, in that our method excludes computational biases caused by variations of signal contrast in the cerebral ventricles, and it incorporates a mutual information-based coregistration procedure into ICC. Moreover, our method does not need to collect an additional imaging dataset, nor does it work well only with DWI data that are acquired at low b-values, which are the major disadvantages of conventional ICC. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated in two experiments using both simulated and real-world DWI data.