Inter-slice motion correction using spatiotemporal interpolation for functional magnetic resonance imaging of the moving fetus

Abstract

Fetal motion continues to be one of the major artifacts in in-utero functional MRI; interestingly few methods have been developed to address fetal motion correction. In this study, we propose a robust method for motion correction in fetal fMRI by which both inter-slice and inter-volume motion artifacts are jointly corrected. To accomplish this, an original volume is temporally split into odd and even slices, and then voxel intensities are spatially and temporally interpolated in the process of image registration. Our experimental data demonstrate that our method was more effective in correcting fetal motion artifact compared to traditional motion correction methods.