Improving the robustness of 3D turbo spin echo imaging to involuntary motion.

Abstract

3D TSE imaging is very prone to motion artifacts, especially from uncooperative patients, because of the long scan duration. The need to repeat this time-consuming 3D acquisition in the event of large motion artifacts substantially reduces patient comfort and increases the workload of the scanner. A new sampling strategy enables homogenized collection of k-space data for 3D TSE imaging. It is combined with Frobenius norm-based motion-detection to enable freely stopped acquisition in 3D TSE imaging whenever excessive subject motion is detected. The feasibility and reliability of the proposed method were demonstrated and evaluated in in-vivo experiments. It is shown that the additional overhead related to repeat scanning of the 3D TSE sequence as a result of patient motion can be substantially reduced by using the homogenized k-space sampling strategy with automatic scan completion as determined by Frobenius norm-based motion-detection.