Investigating the effect of oblique image acquisition on the accuracy of QSM and a robust tilt correction method
Oliver C. Kiersnowski, Anita Karsa, Stephen J. Wastling, John S. Thornton, Karin Shmueli
Abstract
Purpose
Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) is used increasingly for clinical research where oblique image acquisition is commonplace, but its effects on QSM accuracy are not well understood.
Theory and Methods
The QSM processing pipeline involves defining the unit magnetic dipole kernel, which requires knowledge of the direction of the main magnetic field B0 with respect to the acquired image volume axes. The direction of Bo is dependent on the axis and angle of rotation in oblique acquisition. Using both a numerical brain phantom and in vivo acquisitions in 5 healthy volunteers, we analyzed the effects of oblique acquisition on magnetic susceptibility maps. We compared three tilt-correction schemes at each step in the QSM pipeline: phase unwrapping, background field removal and susceptibility calculation, using the RMS error and QSM-tuned structural similarity index.
Results
Rotation of wrapped phase images gave severe artifacts. Background field removal with projection onto dipole fields gave the most accurate susceptibilities when the field map was first rotated into alignment with B0. Laplacian boundary value and variable-kernel sophisticated harmonic artifact reduction for phase data background field removal methods gave accurate results without tilt correction. For susceptibility calculation, thresholded k-space division, iterative Tikhonov regularization, and weighted linear total variation regularization, all performed most accurately when local field maps were rotated into alignment with B0 before susceptibility calculation.
Conclusion
For accurate QSM, oblique acquisition must be taken into account. Rotation of images into alignment with B0 should be carried out after phase unwrapping and before background-field removal. We provide open-source tilt-correction code to incorporate easily into existing pipelines: https://github.com/o-snow/QSM_TiltCorrection.git.