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Dear FSL experts,

I have a basic question that I have not entirely found any answer to,
despite searching the archives and founding several entries.

We are conducting a study on children that are imaged around 11 years of
age. In the index group we can expect that the children cannot perform/cope
with the MRI as well as in the control group (e.g. we expect that they may
move more etc). However, we are, and have to be, blinded in the analysis.
We have collected multishell DWI data (30 dir with b1000 and 60 dir with
b2500 in two consecutive scans) and an additional dataset of reversed
gradient polarity (with 6 dir at b200). Quality of DWI in general good with
adequate SNR. We are pre-processing with topup+eddy. This works fine.

However, there are artefacts in the raw data. Mainly signal dropout
artifacts due to pulsation or head motion. Primarily affecting the
posterior fossa (pulsation) but also in some slices scattered among the
volumes in the superior fossa (head motion here). The larger
signal-dropouts seems to remain after eddy so at least this procedure is
not blending them into the eddy-corrected data.

Have you any advice on how to deal such artefacts in DWI? How to detect
corrupted slices/volumes? Is it best to exclude certain volumes before
fitting a diffusion model? This would mean dropping a lot of valuable data
due artefacts in a few slices. Alternatives would be to use a
post-processing check like RESTORE or HOMOR (are there other suitable for
FSL's diffusion model??) to detect outlier voxels, or better (?) a
pre-processing implementation to combine any of them with DROP-R (Morris et
al, MRM 2011)??

Advice appreciated!

Cheers,
Finn



_______________________________
Finn Lennartsson
Parkvägen 50
SE-18352 Täby, Sweden
Cell: + 46 704 838907
E-mail: [log in to unmask]