Effectiveness of navigator-based prospective motion correction in MPRAGE data acquired at 3T

In MRI, subject motion results in image artifacts. High-resolution 3D scans, like MPRAGE, are particularly susceptible to motion because of long scan times and acquisition of data over multiple-shots. Such motion related artifacts have been shown to cause a bias in cortical measures extracted from segmentation of high-resolution MPRAGE images. Prospective motion correction (PMC) techniques have been developed to help mitigate artifacts due to subject motion. In this work, high-resolution MPRAGE images are acquired during intentional head motion to evaluate the effectiveness of navigator-based PMC techniques to improve both the accuracy and reproducibility of cortical morphometry measures obtained from image segmentation. The contribution of reacquiring segments of k-space affected by motion to the overall performance of PMC is assessed. Additionally, the effect of subject motion on subcortical structure volumes is investigated. In the presence of head motion, navigator-based PMC is shown to improve both the accuracy and reproducibility of cortical and subcortical measures. It is shown that reacquiring segments of k-space data that are corrupted by motion is an essential part of navigator-based PMC performance. Subcortical structure volumes are not affected by motion in the same way as cortical measures; there is not a consistent underestimation.