Reducing respiratory effect in motion correction for EPI images with sequential slice acquisition order

Motion correction is critical for data analysis of fMRI time series. Most motion correction algorithms treat the head as a rigid body. Respiration of the subject, however, can alter the static magnetic field in the head and result in motion-like slice shifts for echo planar imaging (EPI). The delay of acquisition between slices causes a phase difference in respiration so that the shifts vary with slice positions. To characterize the effect of respiration on motion correction, we acquired fast sampled fMRI data using multi-band EPI and then simulated different acquisition schemes. Our results indicated that respiration introduces additional noise after motion correction. The signal variation between volumes after motion correction increases when the effective TR increases from 675 ms to 2025 ms. This problem can be corrected if slices are acquired sequentially. For EPI with a sequential acquisition scheme, we propose to divide the image volumes into several segments so that slices within each segment are acquired close in time and then perform motion correction on these segments separately. We demonstrated that the temporal signal-to-noise ratio (TSNR) was increased when the motion correction was performed on the segments separately rather than on the whole image. This enhancement of TSNR was not evenly distributed across the segments and was not observed for interleaved acquisition. The level of increase was higher for superior slices. On superior slices the percentage of TSNR gain was comparable to that using image based retrospective correction for respiratory noise. Our results suggest that separate motion correction on segments is highly recommended for sequential acquisition schemes, at least for slices distal to the chest. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.