Quantitative analysis of spatial distortions of diffusion techniques at 3T.

Diffusion has been widely adopted in the clinical setting to study the microstructural tissue changes in conjunction with anatomic imaging and metabolic imaging to offer insights on the status of the tissue injury or lesion. However, geometric distortions caused by magnetic susceptibility effects, eddy currents and gradient imperfections greatly affect the clinical utility of the diffusion images. Several diffusion methods have been proposed in the recent years to obtain diffusion parameters with increased accuracy. In most cases, the comparisons to the clinical standard echo-planar imaging (EPI) diffusion are done visually without quantitative measurements. In this study, we present three simple, complementary quantitative methods of nonrigid image registration and shape analyses for evaluating spatial distortions on magnetic resonance images with application in comparing single-shot fast spin-echo (SSFSE) and EPI based diffusion measurements. These methods have confirmed the SSFSE based diffusion method is less distorted than the EPI based one, which is generally accepted through visual inspection.

[1]  Michael Unser,et al.  Unwarping of unidirectionally distorted EPI images , 2000, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[2]  Andrew L Alexander,et al.  Diffusion Tensor Imaging in Cerebral Tumor Diagnosis and Therapy , 2004, Topics in magnetic resonance imaging : TMRI.

[3]  Meng Law,et al.  Applications of Diffusion Tensor MR Imaging in Multiple Sclerosis , 2005, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

[4]  Paul R. Harvey,et al.  Navigator motion correction of diffusion weighted 3D SSFP imaging , 2007, Magnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology and Medicine.

[5]  James G Pipe,et al.  Multishot diffusion‐weighted FSE using PROPELLER MRI , 2002, Magnetic resonance in medicine.

[6]  C. Studholme,et al.  Estimating Tissue Deformation between Functional Images Induced by Intracranial Electrode Implantation Using Anatomical MRI , 2001, NeuroImage.

[7]  D. Le Bihan,et al.  Artifacts and pitfalls in diffusion MRI , 2006, Journal of magnetic resonance imaging : JMRI.

[8]  D. Alsop.  Phase insensitive preparation of single‐shot RARE: Application to diffusion imaging in humans , 1997, Magnetic resonance in medicine.

[9]  Stephen M Smith,et al.  Fast robust automated brain extraction , 2002, Human brain mapping.

[10]  P. Carroll,et al.  Multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging in prostate cancer: present and future , 2008, Current opinion in urology.

[11]  Colin Studholme,et al.  An overlap invariant entropy measure of 3D medical image alignment , 1999, Pattern Recognit..

[12]  P. Basser,et al.  Comprehensive approach for correction of motion and distortion in diffusion‐weighted MRI , 2004, Magnetic resonance in medicine.

[13]  R. Edelman,et al.  Magnetic resonance imaging (2) , 1993, The New England journal of medicine.

[14]  Daniel Rueckert,et al.  Nonrigid registration using free-form deformations: application to breast MR images , 1999, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[15]  Susan M. Chang,et al.  Feasibility of dynamic susceptibility contrast perfusion MR imaging at 3T using a standard quadrature head coil and eight‐channel phased‐array coil with and without SENSE reconstruction , 2006, Journal of magnetic resonance imaging : JMRI.

[16]  C. Sotak,et al.  The role of diffusion tensor imaging in the evaluation of ischemic brain injury – a review , 2002, NMR in biomedicine.

[17]  Joachim M. Buhmann,et al.  Non-parametric similarity measures for unsupervised texture segmentation and image retrieval , 1997, Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

[18]  Pratik Mukherjee,et al.  Single-shot fast spin-echo diffusion tensor imaging of the brain and spine with head and phased array coils at 1.5 T and 3.0 T. , 2004, Magnetic resonance imaging.

[19]  Pratik Mukherjee,et al.  Diffusion tensor imaging and fiber tractography in acute stroke. , 2005, Neuroimaging clinics of North America.