Joint 2D and 3D phase processing for quantitative susceptibility mapping: application to 2D echo‐planar imaging

Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) measures tissue magnetic susceptibility and typically relies on time‐consuming three‐dimensional (3D) gradient‐echo (GRE) MRI. Recent studies have shown that two‐dimensional (2D) multi‐slice gradient‐echo echo‐planar imaging (GRE‐EPI), which is commonly used in functional MRI ( fMRI ) and other dynamic imaging techniques, can also be used to produce data suitable for QSM with much shorter scan times. However, the production of high‐quality QSM maps is difficult because data obtained by 2D multi‐slice scans often have phase inconsistencies across adjacent slices and strong susceptibility field gradients near air–tissue interfaces. To address these challenges in 2D EPI‐based QSM studies, we present a new data processing procedure that integrates 2D and 3D phase processing. First, 2D Laplacian‐based phase unwrapping and 2D background phase removal are performed to reduce phase inconsistencies between slices and remove in‐plane harmonic components of the background phase. This is followed by 3D background phase removal for the through‐plane harmonic components. The proposed phase processing was evaluated with 2D EPI data obtained from healthy volunteers, and compared against conventional 3D phase processing using the same 2D EPI datasets. Our QSM results were also compared with QSM values from time‐consuming 3D GRE data, which were taken as ground truth. The experimental results show that this new 2D EPI‐based QSM technique can produce quantitative susceptibility measures that are comparable with those of 3D GRE‐based QSM across different brain regions (e.g. subcortical iron‐rich gray matter, cortical gray and white matter). This new 2D EPI QSM reconstruction method is implemented within STI Suite, which is a comprehensive shareware for susceptibility imaging and quantification. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.