Influence of preprocessing, distortion correction and cardiac triggering on the quality of diffusion MR images of spinal cord.

ABSTRACT: Diffusion MRI of the spinal cord (SC) is susceptible to geometric distortion caused by field inhomogeneities, and prone to misalignment across time series and signal dropout caused by biological motion. Several modifications of image acquisition and image processing techniques have been introduced to overcome these artifacts, but their specific benefits are largely unproven and warrant further investigations. We aim to evaluate two specific aspects of image acquisition and processing that address image quality in diffusion studies of the spinal cord: susceptibility corrections to reduce geometric distortions, and cardiac triggering to minimize motion artifacts. First, we evaluate 4 distortion preprocessing strategies on 7 datasets of the cervical and lumbar SC and find that while distortio

SUBMITTER: Schilling KG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11218893 | biostudies-literature | 2024 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature