Integrated SENSE DTI with correction of susceptibility- and eddy current-induced geometric distortions

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is vulnerable to geometric distortions caused by subject-dependent susceptibility effects and diffusion-weighting direction-dependent eddy currents. Although the introduction of sensitivity encoding (SENSE) has reduced the overall distortions for the same imaging matrix size, this benefit is offset by the increasing demand for higher spatial resolution. Thus, significant distortions remain or are exacerbated in high-resolution SENSE DTI acquisitions. While the susceptibility-induced distortions cause global spatial misregistration, the direction-dependent eddy current-induced distortions cause misregistration among different diffusion-weighted images, leading to errors in the derivation of the diffusion tensor in virtually all voxels, and consequently in resulting diffusion parameters as well as in fiber tracking. Here, we apply a comprehensive approach that corrects for both susceptibility- and eddy current-induced distortions to high-resolution SENSE DTI acquisitions, and demonstrate its effectiveness, efficiency, and reliability in vivo as well as its advantages over a twice-refocused spin-echo sequence. This method should find increased use in modern DTI experiments where SENSE acquisitions are commonly used.