Suppressing Respiration Effects when Geometric Distortion Is Corrected Dynamically by Phase Labeling for Additional Coordinate Encoding (PLACE) during Functional MRI

Echo planar imaging (EPI) suffers from geometric distortions caused by magnetic field inhomogeneities, which can be time-varying as a result of small amounts of head motion that occur over seconds and minutes during fMRI experiments, also known as “dynamic geometric distortion”. Phase Labeling for Additional Coordinate Encoding (PLACE) is a promising technique for geometric distortion correction without reduced temporal resolution and in principle can be used to correct for motion-induced dynamic geometric distortion. PLACE requires at least two EPI images of the same anatomy that are ideally acquired with no variation in the magnetic field inhomogeneities. However, head motion and lung ventilation during the respiratory cycle can cause changes in magnetic field inhomogeneities within the EPI pair used for PLACE. In this work, we exploited dynamic off-resonance in k-space (DORK) and averaging to correct the within EPI pair magnetic field inhomogeneities; and hence proposed a combined technique (DORK+PLACE+averaging) to mitigate dynamic geometric distortion in EPI-based fMRI while preserving the temporal resolution. The performance of the combined DORK, PLACE and averaging technique was characterized through several imaging experiments involving test phantoms and six healthy adult volunteers. Phantom data illustrate reduced temporal standard deviation of fMRI signal intensities after use of combined dynamic PLACE, DORK and averaging compared to the standard processing and static geometric distortion correction. The combined technique also substantially improved the temporal standard deviation and activation maps obtained from human fMRI data in comparison to the results obtained by standard processing and static geometric distortion correction, highlighting the utility of the approach.