Correction of Artifacts Caused by Transient Eddy Currents In Simultaneous Multi-Slice dMRI

In Simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) middle slices are inevitably acquired at the beginning of each diffusion-encoded volume, making SMS more sensitive to artifacts due to transient eddy currents than conventional diffusion-weighted MRI (dMRI). In conventional dMRI slices affected by transient eddy currents are often at the edge of the slice group and can be safely ignored. In SMS, however, the majority of the simultaneously excited slices are in the middle of the slice group and transient eddy currents cause the slices in the initial a few excitations to have different geometric distortions than the slices in the later excitations, when eddy currents have achieved steady state. In this work the artifact is explained and demonstrated in scans of a phantom and human brain. A simple post-processing correction is proposed and demonstrated to be effective in correcting the artifact. The importance of realizing and addressing this artifact is heightened by the number of studies using SMS dMRI.

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