Improved motion correction in brain MRI using 3D radial trajectory and projection moment analysis

Abstract Purpose To develop a generalized rigid body motion correction method in 3D radial brain MRI to deal with continuous motion pattern through projection moment analysis. Methods An assumption was made that the multichannel coil moves with the head, which was achieved by using a flexible head coil. A two‐step motion correction scheme was proposed to directly extract the motion parameters from the acquired k‐space data using the analysis of center‐of‐mass with high noise robustness, which were used for retrospective motion correction. A recursive least‐squares model was introduced to recursively estimate the motion parameters for every single spoke, which used the smoothness of motion and resulted in high temporal resolution and low computational cost. Five volunteers were scanned at 3 T using a 3D radial multidimensional golden‐means trajectory with instructed motion patterns. The performance was tested through both simulation and in vivo experiments. Quantitative image quality metrics were calculated for comparison. Results The proposed method showed good accuracy and precision in both translation and rotation estimation. A better result was achieved using the proposed two‐step correction compared to traditional one‐step correction without significantly increasing computation time. Retrospective correction showed substantial improvements in image quality among all scans, even for stationary scans. Conclusions The proposed method provides an easy, robust, and time‐efficient tool for motion correction in brain MRI, which may benefit clinical diagnosis of uncooperative patients as well as scientific MRI researches.