Evaluation of prospective motion correction of high-resolution 3D-T2-FLAIR acquisitions in epilepsy patients

Area of Science:

• Radiology and Medical Imaging
• Neuroscience
• Neurology

Background:

• T2-FLAIR MRI is crucial for detecting lesions in focal epilepsies.
• High-resolution 3D sequences are prone to motion artifacts, impacting image quality.
• Prospective motion correction (PMC) has shown promise in improving pediatric MRI scans.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the clinical benefit of applying navigator-based PMC to high-resolution 3D-T2-FLAIR MRI in adult epilepsy patients.
• To assess the impact of PMC on various image quality metrics, including lesion conspicuity and diagnostic confidence.
• To determine if PMC reduces the rate of non-diagnostic scans.

Main Methods:

• Coronal 3D-T2-FLAIR scans (1mm isotropic resolution, 3T scanner) were acquired with and without navigator-based PMC in adult epilepsy patients.
• Two expert neuroradiologists visually assessed six image quality criteria on a seven-point Likert scale.
• Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was objectively quantified in the white matter.

Main Results:

• PMC scans showed comparable scores to non-PMC scans for most criteria, except for intensity homogeneity, which was generally worse with PMC.
• The percentage of scans with poor image quality was significantly lower with PMC (3.25%) compared to without PMC (12.5%) across five criteria.
• Quantitative SNR analysis revealed no significant difference between PMC and non-PMC scans (P=0.07).

Conclusions:

• Applying PMC to 3D-T2-FLAIR sequences effectively reduces the incidence of low-quality scans in adult epilepsy patients.
• PMC decreases the need for rescanning, leading to more efficient data acquisition for clinical diagnosis.
• PMC enhances the reliability of MRI for identifying lesions in focal epilepsy.