Collaborative Reconstruction of PROPELLER-EPI Data Using POCSMUSE (CORPUSE) for High-Fidelity Diffusion MRI

Area of Science:

• Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
• Diffusion Imaging
• Image Reconstruction

Background:

• Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is crucial for assessing tissue microstructure.
• PROPELLER-EPI techniques improve motion robustness but face challenges with acceleration and artifacts.
• Efficient, high-resolution DWI is needed for clinical applications.

Purpose of the Study:

• Develop a reconstruction framework (CORPUSE) for multiblade DW-PROPELLER-EPI.
• Improve image quality, SNR efficiency, and reduce artifacts under acceleration.
• Enable high-resolution DTI with fewer blades.

Main Methods:

• CORPUSE is a joint reconstruction framework adapted from POCSMUSE for multiblade DW-PROPELLER-EPI.
• Integrates distortion-correction and exploits multiblade sampling redundancy.
• Uses phase errors and field maps as physics-based constraints for reconstruction.

Main Results:

• CORPUSE improved image sharpness, geometric fidelity, and reconstruction quality compared to conventional methods.
• Enabled higher per-blade acceleration and wider blades without compromising image quality.
• Demonstrated superior motion resilience compared to multiplexed sensitivity encoding (MUSE).

Conclusions:

• CORPUSE framework enables high-resolution, high-quality DTI with fewer blades.
• Improves practicality and efficiency of DW-PROPELLER-EPI.
• Offers a robust, efficient alternative to other multishot diffusion imaging approaches.