3D Diffusion-Weighted MRI with SSFP: Rigid- And Non-Rigid-Body Phase Correction

Rafael O'Halloran¹, Murat Aksoy¹, Roland Bammer¹

The main obstacle to high-resolution 3D diffusion-weighted MRI is the motion-induced phase error. In this work the phase error is addressed with a hybrid 3D navigator approach that corrects phase induced by rigid-body motion for every shot and phase induced by repeatable non-rigid-body pulsation over the cardiac cycle. This phase correction method was shown to mitigate signal dropouts caused by shot-to-shot phase inconsistencies compared to a standard gridding reconstruction in healthy volunteers. The 3D SSFP approach was also compared to 2D DW-EPI and shown to have similar diffusion contrast.