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

Abstract: Motion artifacts often spoil the radiological interpretation of MR images, and in the most severe cases the scan needs be repeated, with additional costs for the provider. We discuss the application of a novel 3D retrospective rigid motion correction and reconstruction scheme for MRI, which leverages multiple scans contained in a MR session. Typically, in a multi-contrast MR session, motion does not equally affect all the scans, and some motion-free scans are generally available, so that we can exploit their anatomic similarity. The uncorrupted scan is used as a reference in a generalized rigid-motion registration problem to remove the motion artifacts affecting the corrupted scans. We discuss the potential of the proposed algorithm with a prospective in-vivo study and clinical 3D brain protocols. This framework can be easily incorporated into the existing clinical practice with no disruption to the conventional workflow.