Comparison of inhomogeneity distortion correction methods in diffusion MRI of the spinal cord

Abstract : Purpose / Introduction Diffusion MRI (dMRI) is a modality that describes the geometry of neural architecture. Diffusion images suffer from various artifacts originating from subject and physiological motion, eddy currents and B0-field inhomogeneity. These can severely affect image quality particularly in the spine region. However, strategies exist to correct these distortions, including co-registration, point spread function, phase field map and reversed gradient polarity method (RGPM). In this work, we focus on the comparative evaluation of correction methods using RGPM which provides best results [1]. More precisely, we compare Voss [1,2] plus two other recent methods: FSL’s Topup [3] and SPM’s HySCO [4].