Model-Based Nyquist Ghost Correction for Reversed Readout Echo Planar Imaging

Single-polarity reference scan-based paradigms are routinely used to combat Nyquist ghosting artifacts, they often fail to the fully suppress them because of statistical biases in estimated correction coefficients that result from noise and off-resonance effects. Prior work has shown that use of dual-polarity reference scans can mitigate the latter. In this work, we propose that this concept can be generalized to enable robust Nyquist ghost correction (NGC) directly from two reversed-readout EPI acquisitions – without explicit reference scanning. In-vivo results show the similar trends as in phantom examples, with the proposed-NGC mitigating aliasing artifacts representing up to 20% intensity errors.