Distortion-Corrected Diffusion MRI Using Rotated-View EPI and Joint Field-Map/Image Estimation with Gaussian Primitives

Echo Planar Imaging (EPI) is the standard acquisition technique for diffusion and functional neuroimaging, enabling rapid imaging but suffering from geometric distortions caused by B0 field inhomogeneities. Existing correction methods first reconstruct distorted images using parallel imaging, then estimate the B0 field and correct the distortion in the image domain. In this sequential process, reconstruction artifacts at high acceleration factors and low SNR at high diffusion b-values degrade B0 estimation and limit the overall correction quality. We propose a physics-informed framework that jointly estimates the B0 field and distortion-free image directly from k-space data, without depending on an intermediate parallel-imaging reconstruction for the correction. The image and the B0 field are each represented as a superposition of Gaussian primitives embedded within an MRI physics forward model. The explicit, continuous parameterization captures both smooth regions and tissue boundaries and supports rotated-view EPI acquisitions without interpolation. The diffusion-weighted image is modeled as real and non-negative, with the image phase absorbed into a per-shot phase factor. Rotated views distribute distortions across multiple phase-encoding orientations, improving point spread function isotropy and providing stronger constraints for B0 estimation. On in vivo brain diffusion EPI, the proposed method attains the closest brain-boundary agreement with a distortion-free structural reference, with the largest improvement over sequential methods at high b-value and high acceleration. Extensive visual comparisons further show improved detail fidelity and noise suppression.

Fast Reconstruction of Motion-Corrupted Data with Mobile-GRAPPA: Motion and dB0 Inhomogeneity Correction Leveraging Efficient GRAPPA

Advanced motion navigations now enable rapid tracking of subject motion and dB0-induced phase, but accurately incorporating this high-temporal-resolution information into SENSE (Aligned-SENSE) is often computationally prohibitive. We propose "Mobile-GRAPPA", a k-space "cleaning" approach that uses local GRAPPA operators to remove motion and dB0 related corruption so that the resulting data can be reconstructed with standard SENSE. We efficiently train a family of k-space-position-specific Mobile-GRAPPA kernels via a lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP) and apply them across k-space to generate clean data. In experiments on highly motion-corrupted 1-mm whole-brain GRE (Tacq = 10 min; 1,620 motion/dB0 trackings) and EPTI (Tacq = 2 min; 544 trackings), Mobile-GRAPPA enabled accurate reconstruction with negligible time penalty, whereas full Aligned-SENSE was impractical (reconstruction times > 10 h for GRE and > 10 days for EPTI). These results show that Mobile-GRAPPA incorporates detailed motion and dB0 tracking into SENSE with minimal computational overhead, enabling fast, high-quality reconstructions of challenging data.