Evaluation of Scout Accelerated Motion Estimation and Reduction (SAMER) MPRAGE for Visual Grading and Volumetric Measurement of Brain Tissue

Volumetric brain MRI using the T1-weighted-MPRAGE sequence is an important component of the clinical evaluation of dementia. However, MPRAGE has a long acquisition time and is especially prone to patient motion artifact. A recent development to address this issue is a technique called Scout Accelerated Motion Estimation and Reduction (SAMER). In this work, we used a set of 90 MPRAGE scans derived from 10 healthy volunteers to demonstrate that SAMER is effective at correcting various degrees of motion, including severe motion with non-diagnostic image quality, and greatly increases the accuracy of volumetric brain measurements.