A joint acquisition-reconstruction paradigm for correcting inhomogeneity artifacts in MR echo planar imaging

One of the main sources of signal degradation in rapid MR acquisitions, such as Echo Planar Imaging (EPI), is magnetic field variations caused by field inhomogeneities and susceptibility gradients. If unaccounted for during the reconstruction process, this spatially-varying field can cause severe image artifacts. In this paper, we show that correcting for the resulting degradations can be formulated as a blind image deconvolution problem. We propose a novel joint acquisition-processing paradigm to solve this problem. We describe a practical implementation of this paradigm using a multi-image acquisition strategy and a corresponding joint estimation-reconstruction algorithm. The estimation step computes the spatial distribution of the field maps, while the reconstruction step yields a Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) estimate of the imaged slice. Our simulations show that this proposed joint acquisition-reconstruction method is robust and efficient, offering factors of improvement in the quality of the reconstructed image as compared to other traditional methods.