Abstract
Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) is essential for studying the microstructure of the developing fetal brain. However, fetal motion during scans and its interaction with magnetic field inhomogeneities lead to amplified artifacts and data scattering, compromising the consistency of dMRI analysis. This work introduces HAITCH, a novel open-source framework for correcting and reconstructing high-angular resolution dMRI data from challenging fetal scans. Our multi-stage approach incorporates an optimized multi-shell design for increased information capture and motion tolerance, a blip-reversed dual-echo multi-shell acquisition for dynamic distortion correction, advanced motion correction for robust and model-free reconstruction, and outlier detection for improved reconstruction fidelity. Validation experiments on real fetal dMRI scans demonstrate significant improvements and accurate correction across diverse fetal ages and motion levels. HAITCH effectively removes artifacts and reconstructs high-fidelity dMRI data suitable for advanced diffusion modeling and tractography.
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Acknowledgment
This research was supported in part by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under award numbers R01NS106030, R01EB031849, R01EB032366, R01HD109395, R01HD110772, R01HD113199, R01NS128281, and R01NS121657; in part by the Office of the Director of the NIH under award number S10OD025111; and in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant number 212306. This research was also partly supported by an award from NVIDIA Corporation and utilized NVIDIA RTX A6000 and RTX A5000 GPUs. The content of this publication is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH, NSF, or NVIDIA.
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Snoussi, H., Karimi, D., Afacan, O., Utkur, M., Gholipour, A. (2025). Advanced Framework for Fetal Diffusion MRI: Dynamic Distortion and Motion Correction. In: Link-Sourani, D., Abaci Turk, E., Macgowan, C., Hutter, J., Melbourne, A., Licandro, R. (eds) Perinatal, Preterm and Paediatric Image Analysis. PIPPI 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14747. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-73260-7_4
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