梯度回波序列是磁共振成像中常用的脉冲序列,然而梯度回波对主磁场波动非常敏感,呼吸等生理运动引起的信号波动会导致图像伪影.该文报道了采用导航回波技术获取呼吸运动导致的局部磁场波动,用以矫正图像回波中随时间变化的相位波动,并将该技术应用于三维多回波梯度回波成像和T2*定量图研究.研究结果显示:矫正前,相位波动幅度随回波时间增长而增大,模图和T2*定量图在相位编码方向有明显伪影,并且男女呼吸伪影水平有显著性差异;矫正后,相位波动幅度大幅下降,图像伪影水平有显著性下降.
Images acquired with gradient echo sequences are susceptible to artifacts induced by frequency offsets varying in spatial and temporal dimensions. This study addressed how respiration-induced local field fluctuations affect the quality of brain images acquired with a three-dimensional multi-echo gradient echo sequence. It was shown that respiration-related artifacts can be corrected by acquire a one-dimensional navigator signal before the application of phase-encoding gradient in each phase-encoding step, which later can be used to correct respiration-related phase shifts during reconstruction to yield artifact-free images. Experimental results showed that both the respiration-related phase oscillations and image artifacts increased with echo time. It was also demonstrated that the phase fluctuations and image artifact levels in both the gradient echo images and T2* maps calculated from mutli-echo data reduced significantly after navigator echo phase correction.