Compensation of breathing motion artifacts for MRI with continuously moving table

Breathing motion is one of the main sources of artifacts in MRI acquisitions that can severely impair diagnosis. In MRI with continuously moving table, the application of common motion compensation approaches such as breath holding or the synchronization of the measurement with the breathing motion can be problematic. In this study, a technique for the reduction of breathing-motion artifacts for MRI with continuously moving table is presented, which reconstructs motion-consistent volumes from data acquired during free breathing. Axial images are acquired rapidly compared to the period of the breathing motion and consistently combined using a combination of rigid and nonrigid slice-to-volume registration. This new technique is compared to a previously reported artifact reduction method for MRI with continuously moving table that is based on the same acquisition scheme. While the latter method only suppresses ghosting artifacts, the new technique is shown to additionally reduce blurring, misregistrations, and signal cancellations in the reconstructed images.