Implementation and Application of PSF-Based EPI Distortion Correction to High Field Animal Imaging

Abstract EN

The purpose of this work is to demonstrate the functionality and performance of a PSF-based geometric distortion correction for high-field functional animal EPI.

The EPI method was extended to measure the PSF and a postprocessing chain was implemented in Matlab for offline distortion correction.

The correction procedure was applied to phantom and in vivo imaging of mice and rats at 9.4T using different SE-EPI and DWI-EPI protocols.

Results show the significant improvement in image quality for single- and multishot EPI.

Using a reduced FOV in the PSF encoding direction clearly reduced the acquisition time for PSF data by an acceleration factor of 2 or 4, without affecting the correction quality.