• M Okan Irfanoglu, Pooja Modi, Amritha Nayak, Elizabeth B Hutchinson, Joelle Sarlls, and Carlo Pierpaoli.
• Section on Tissue Biophysics and Biomimetics, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda 20892, USA; Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD 20814, USA. Electronic address: irfanoglumo@helix.nih.gov.
• Neuroimage. 2015 Feb 1; 106: 284-99.

AbstractWe propose an echo planar imaging (EPI) distortion correction method (DR-BUDDI), specialized for diffusion MRI, which uses data acquired twice with reversed phase encoding directions, often referred to as blip-up blip-down acquisitions. DR-BUDDI can incorporate information from an undistorted structural MRI and also use diffusion-weighted images (DWI) to guide the registration, improving the quality of the registration in the presence of large deformations and in white matter regions. DR-BUDDI does not require the transformations for correcting blip-up and blip-down images to be the exact inverse of each other. Imposing the theoretical "blip-up blip-down distortion symmetry" may not be appropriate in the presence of common clinical scanning artifacts such as motion, ghosting, Gibbs ringing, vibrations, and low signal-to-noise. The performance of DR-BUDDI is evaluated with several data sets and compared to other existing blip-up blip-down correction approaches. The proposed method is robust and generally outperforms existing approaches. The inclusion of the DWIs in the correction process proves to be important to obtain a reliable correction of distortions in the brain stem. Methods that do not use DWIs may produce a visually appealing correction of the non-diffusion weighted images, but the directionally encoded color maps computed from the tensor reveal an abnormal anatomy of the white matter pathways. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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