Erik B. Beall1, Wanyong Shin1,
Kecheng Liu2, Ken E. Sakaie1, Mingyi Li1,
Dominic Holland3, Anders M. Dale4, Mark J. Lowe1
1Imaging Institute,
Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH, United States; 2Siemens Medical
Solutions USA, Inc, Malvern, PA, United States; 3Neurosciences,
University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States; 4Radiology,
University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States
White matter diffusion MRI is affected by both static field inhomogeneity and dynamic field distortions from eddy currents induced by the diffusion gradients. A recent method providing robust image unwarping using forward and reverse phase-encode direction EPI scans is applied to DTI data acquired with paired forward/reverese phase-encode volumes, for every volume. In this way, dynamic displacement maps due to both static inhomogeneity and dynamic eddy current artifacts can be calculated for every volume. We present results showing that this method produces improved image quality in both twice and single refocus spin-echo DTI.