Purpose: Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) of the abdomen has increased dramatically for both research and clinical purposes. Motion and static field inhomogeneity related challenges limit image quality of abdominopelvic imaging with the most conventional echo-planar imaging (EPI) pulse sequence. While reversed phase encoded imaging is increasingly used to facilitate distortion correction, it typically assumes one motion independent magnetic field distribution. In this study, we describe a more generalized workflow for the case of kidney DWI in which the field inhomogeneity at multiple respiratory phases is mapped and used to correct all images in a multi-contrast DWI series.
Methods: In this HIPAA-compliant and IRB-approved prospective study, 8 volunteers (6 M, ages 28-51) had abdominal imaging performed in a 3 T MRI system (MAGNETOM Prisma; Siemens Healthcare, Erlangen, Germany) with ECG gating. Coronal oblique T2-weighted HASTE images were collected for anatomical reference. Sagittal phase-contrast (PC) MRI images through the left renal artery were collected to determine systolic and diastolic phases. Cardiac triggered oblique coronal DWI were collected at 10 b-values between 0 and 800 s/mm2 and 12 directions. DWI series were distortion corrected using field maps generated by forward and reversed phase encoded b = 0 images collected over the full respiratory cycle and matched by respiratory phase. Morphologic accuracy, intraseries spatial variability, and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) metrics mean diffusivity (MD) and fractional anisotropy (FA) were compared for results generated with no distortion correction, correction with only one respiratory bin, and correction with multiple respiratory bins across the breathing cycle.
Results: Computed field maps showed significant variation in static field with kidney laterality, region, and respiratory phase. Distortion corrected images showed significantly better registration to morphologic images than uncorrected images; for the left kidney, the multiple bin correction outperformed one bin correction. Line profile analysis showed significantly reduced spatial variation with multiple bins than one bin correction. DTI metrics were mostly similar between correction methods, with some differences observed in MD between uncorrected and corrected datasets.
Conclusions: Our results indicate improved morphology of kidney DWI and derived parametric maps as well as reduced variability over the full image series using the motion-resolved distortion correction. This work highlights some morphologic and quantitative metric improvements can be obtained for kidney DWI when distortion correction is performed in a respiratory-resolved manner.
Keywords: DTI; DWI; Distortion correction; Kidney; Magnetic field inhomogeneity; Motion correction; Renal.
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