Assessment of Subject Head Motion in Diffusion MRI

Subject head motion during the acquisition of diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) of the brain induces artifacts and affects image quality. Information about the frequency and extent of motion could reveal which aspects of motion correction are most necessary. Therefore, we investigate the extent of translation and rotation among participants, and how the motion changes during the scan acquisition. We analyze 5,380 DWI scans from 1,034 participants. We measure the rotations and translations in the sagittal, coronal and transverse planes needed to align the volumes to the first and previous volumes, as well as the displacement. The different types of motion are compared with each other and compared over time. The largest rotation (per minute) is around the right - left axis (median 0.378 °/min, range 0.000 - 11.466°) and the largest translation (per minute) is along the anterior - posterior axis (median 1.867 mm/min, range 0.000 - 10.944 mm). We additionally observe that spikes in movement occur at the beginning of the scan, particularly in anterior - posterior translation. The results show that all scans are affected by subtle head motion, which may impact subsequent image analysis.