3D Magnetic Susceptibility Correction with Application to Diffusion-Weighted Imaging

Anh Tu Van¹, Bradley P. Sutton²

To achieve a realistic scan time in vivo and mitigate the undersampling due to the rigid-body-motion-induced phase errors, 3D diffusion-weighted imaging usually has long readout duration leading to severe magnetic susceptibility artifacts even when a spin echo acquisition is used. The current study proposes to correct for the magnetic susceptibility artifacts in 3D diffusion-weighted imaging by incorporating the 3D field map information in the 3D encoding matrix and solving the inverse problem iteratively. In vivo results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in minimizing the magnetic susceptibility artifacts and improving the delineation of white matter structures in diffusion-weighted imaging.