Best of both MoCo worlds: combining fast pilot tone motion sensing with retrospective SAMER correction

Motivation: Model-based retrospective motion correction has shown good results but sometimes lacks enough information to accurately derive motion parameters. Goal(s): To use the pilot tone to address the drawbacks of retrospective methods by providing them with high-frequency motion information for more robust and efficient motion correction. Approach: We use pilot tone to refine and increase the temporal resolution of motion parameters for the Scout Accelerated Motion Estimation and Reduction (SAMER) method. Results: Motion phantom and volunteer tests show improved image quality of pilot tone + SAMER compared to SAMER-only while the reconstruction takes clinically acceptable 20s. Impact: Our results demonstrate that pilot tone can be used to improve the precision and temporal resolution of a model-based retrospective motion correction method, while being robust and fast. This will help to further mitigate motion artifacts in clinical routine.