Detection and Correction of Spurious Motion Within Overlapped Multi-Slice Prostate T2-Weighted Acquisitions

Motivation: Motion frequently impairs T2 weighted prostate imaging; in the multi-pass acquisitions that are common this results in an objectionable stair-step artifact, and can lead to additional scans and increased exam time. Goal(s): Reduce the impact of motion occurring in a subset of the multi-pass acquisition. Approach: Automatic detection of motion (through a mutual-information metric) coupled with replacement of corrupted slices via averaging of neighbors. In the described case, adjacent slices are intentionally overlapped, leading to reasonable results from this approach. Results: Improvements are clearly visible in both motion-controlled phantom and a subset of volunteer examinations. Impact: The ability to automatically repair a portion of motion-corrupted exams may enable reduction of supplemental / repeat scans, improving overall exam times. The described technique is not computationally complex, and could be performed inline after scan completion.