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Automatic correction of echo-planar imaging (EPI) ghosting artifacts in real-time interactive cardiac MRI using sensitivity encoding

✍ Scribed by Yoon-Chul Kim; Jon-Fredrik Nielsen; Krishna S. Nayak


Publisher
John Wiley and Sons
Year
2008
Tongue
English
Weight
397 KB
Volume
27
Category
Article
ISSN
1053-1807

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✦ Synopsis


Abstract

Purpose

To develop a method that automatically corrects ghosting artifacts due to echo‐misalignment in interleaved gradient‐echo echo‐planar imaging (EPI) in arbitrary oblique or double‐oblique scan planes.

Materials and Methods

An automatic ghosting correction technique was developed based on an alternating EPI acquisition and the phased‐array ghost elimination (PAGE) reconstruction method. The direction of k‐space traversal is alternated at every temporal frame, enabling lower temporal‐resolution ghost‐free coil sensitivity maps to be dynamically estimated. The proposed method was compared with conventional one‐dimensional (1D) phase correction in axial, oblique, and double‐oblique scan planes in phantom and cardiac in vivo studies. The proposed method was also used in conjunction with two‐fold acceleration.

Results

The proposed method with nonaccelerated acquisition provided excellent suppression of ghosting artifacts in all scan planes, and was substantially more effective than conventional 1D phase correction in oblique and double‐oblique scan planes. The feasibility of real‐time reconstruction using the proposed technique was demonstrated in a scan protocol with 3.1‐mm spatial and 60‐msec temporal resolution.

Conclusion

The proposed technique with nonaccelerated acquisition provides excellent ghost suppression in arbitrary scan orientations without a calibration scan, and can be useful for real‐time interactive imaging, in which scan planes are frequently changed with arbitrary oblique orientations. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.