Removal of Synergistic Physiological Motion and Image Artefacts in Functional MRI of the Human Spinal Cord

Patrick W. Stroman¹, Rachael L. Bosma¹, Michaela Beynon¹, Christine Dobek¹

An improvement in physiological noise removal in spinal cord fMRI data is demonstrated. A combination of phase errors due to flow of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), and image artefacts at high intensity boundaries between CSF and adjacent tissues, is revealed by means of computer simulations of the spinal fMRI acquisition. Spatially and temporally variant signals are demonstrated that do not match the timing of the CSF flow itself. However, the cause of this physiological noise enables it to be modeled as a convolution of a distortion operator, and the unaffected data, and we demonstrate a means of modeling and removing it.