Robust 2D phase correction for echo planar imaging under a tight field-of-view

Nyquist ghost artifacts are a serious issue in echo planar imaging. These artifacts primarily originate from phase difference between even and odd echo images and can be removed or reduced using phase correction methods. The commonly used 1D phase correction can only correct phase difference along readout axis. 2D correction is, therefore, necessary when phase difference presents along both readout and phase encoding axes. However, existing 2D methods have several unaddressed issues that affect their practicality. These issues include uncharacterized noise behavior, image artifact due to unoptimized phase estimation, Gibbs ringing artifact when directly applying to partial k(y) data, and most seriously a new image artifact under tight field-of-view (i.e., field-of-view slightly smaller than object size). All these issues are addressed in this article. Specifically, theoretical analysis of noise amplification and effect of phase estimation error is provided, and tradeoff between noise and ghost is studied. A new 2D phase correction method with improved polynomial fitting, joint homodyne processing and phase correction, compatibility with tight field-of-view is then proposed. Various results show that the proposed method can robustly generate images free of Nyquist ghosts and other image artifacts even in oblique scans or when cross-term eddy current terms are significant.