4D iterative reconstruction of brain fMRI in the moving fetus

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel 4D iterative reconstruction method for fetal brain fMRI that improves image quality by better handling fetal movement, surpassing traditional 3D interpolation techniques.

Contribution

The study presents a new 4D iterative reconstruction approach for fetal fMRI that enhances image accuracy over existing methods.

Findings

Improved reconstruction quality over traditional methods

Quantitative evaluation on clinical data shows better accuracy

Method effectively handles fetal movement artifacts

Abstract

Resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is a powerful imaging technique for studying functional development of the brain in utero. However, unpredictable and excessive movement of fetuses has limited clinical application since it causes substantial signal fluctuations which can systematically alter observed patterns of functional connectivity. Previous studies have focused on the accurate estimation of the motion parameters in case of large fetal head movement and used a 3D single step interpolation approach at each timepoint to recover motion-free fMRI images. This does not guarantee that the reconstructed image corresponds to the minimum error representation of fMRI time series given the acquired data. Here, we propose a novel technique based on four dimensional iterative reconstruction of the scattered slices acquired during fetal fMRI. The accuracy of the proposed method was quantitatively evaluated on a group of real clinical fMRI fetuses. The results indicate improvements of reconstruction quality compared to the conventional 3D interpolation approach.