Towards retrospective motion correction and reconstruction for clinical 3D brain MRI protocols with a reference contrast

Object: In a typical MR session, several contrasts are acquired. Due to the sequential nature of the data acquisition process, the patient may experience some discomfort at some point during the session, and start moving. Hence, it is quite common to have MR sessions where some contrasts are well-resolved, while other contrasts exhibit motion artifacts. Instead of repeating the scans that are corrupted by motion, we introduce a reference-guided retrospective motion correction scheme that takes advantage of the motion-free scans, based on a generalized rigid registration routine. Materials and methods: We focus on various existing clinical 3D brain protocols at 1.5 Tesla MRI based on Cartesian sampling. Controlled experiments with three healthy volunteers and three levels of motion are performed. Results: Radiological inspection confirms that the proposed method consistently ameliorates the corrupted scans. Furthermore, for the set of specific motion tests performed in this study, the quality indexes based on PSNR and SSIM shows only a modest decrease in correction quality as a function of motion complexity. Discussion: While the results on controlled experiments are positive, future applications to patient data will ultimately clarify whether the proposed correction scheme satisfies the radiological requirements.