Image-based method for automated phase correction of ghost

One of the most common artifacts for echo planar imaging is the ghost artifact, typically overcome with the aid of a reference scan preceding the actual image acquisition. In this work, we describe an automated free-scan-reference method for reducing ghost artifact using image-based correction. The two dimensional Fourier transformation of an entire data of image matrix is used to reconstruct two new images, one is reconstructed only by even rows, the other is only by odd rows, with the remaining ones zero-filled. Phase shift between even echoes and odd echoes can be computed by using the two images. Unwrapped phase shift gained by Marquardt-Levenber unlinear fitting can be used to suppress the ghost effectively.