To trigger or not to trigger – removing cardiac triggering in diffusion MRI of the cervical spinal cord saves time without sacrificing quality

Cardiac triggering is commonly used in diffusion MRI protocols of the cervical spinal cord to reduce cardiac-related motion. However, this dramatically increases scan time and can limit high angular resolution multi-shell experiments. We test whether advances in preprocessing motion correction and fitting procedures may overcome cardiac-related motion artifacts. We find that removing cardiac triggering regains significant scan time with no increase in prevalence of artifacts, while providing similar quantitative indices with comparable reproducibility. In summary, removing cardiac triggering for cervical spinal cord diffusion saves time without sacrificing image quality.