Motion compensated abdominal diffusion weighted MRI by simultaneous image registration and model estimation (SIR-ME)

Non-invasive characterization of water molecule’s mobility variations by quantitative analysis of diffusion-weighted MRI (DW-MRI) signal decay in the abdomen has the potential to serve as a biomarker in gastrointestinal and oncological applications. Accurate and reproducible estimation of the signal decay model parameters is challenging due to the presence of respiratory, cardiac, and peristalsis motion. Independent registration of each b-value image to the b-value=0 s/mm² image prior to parameter estimation might be sub-optimal because of the low SNR and contrast difference between images of varying b-value. In this work, we introduce a motion-compensated parameter estimation framework that simultaneously solves image registration and model estimation (SIR-ME) problems by utilizing the interdependence of acquired volumes along the diffusion weighting dimension. We evaluated the improvement in model parameters estimation accuracy using 16 in-vivo DW-MRI data sets of Crohn’s disease patients by comparing parameter estimates obtained using the SIR-ME model to the parameter estimates obtained by fitting the signal decay model to the acquired DW-MRI images. The proposed SIR-ME model reduced the average root-mean-square error between the observed signal and the fitted model by more than 50%. Moreover, the SIR-ME model estimates discriminate between normal and abnormal bowel loops better than the standard parameter estimates.