Sofia Chavez1, Elizabeth Ramsay1,
Donald Plewes1,2, Greg Stanisz1,2, Q-San Xiang3
1Imaging Research, Sunnybrook Health
Sciences Centre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; 2Medical Biophysics,
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; 3Department of
Radiology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
A
feasibility study for the application of
PLACE, an EPI distortion correction, to diffusion weighted images
(DWIs) is presented. PLACE requires a minimum of two input images which
differ by an extra blip along the phase encode (PE) direction. The phase
relation between the images encodes the PE coordinate, allowing for
correction of the EPI-based distortion along the PE direction. Results show
successful distortion correction for DWIs of a phantom despite the lower SNR,
partial k-space and ramp sampling typical of standard DWI sequences. In vivo
application of PLACE to DWI is currently under investigation.