Pilot Tone-navigated motion estimation for liver DW-MRI

Diffusion-weighted MRI (DW-MRI) is capable of detecting and characterizing liver tumors and following-up treatments. Unfortunately, respiratory motion during DW-MRI scan causes misalignments between slices and reduces image quality. 3D slice-to-volume registration (SVR) can be employed to correct for motion. However, motion estimates may be inaccurate for high b-value images where SNR decreases. In this work, we propose to use PT estimated motion correction, which is calibrated on 3D SVR motion parameters obtained from low b-value images. We showed misalignments between slices are reduced by the proposed PT-based motion correction compared to SVR-based motion correction and no correction.