Spin‐history artifact during functional MRI: Potential for adaptive correction

Purpose: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is limited by sensitivity to millimetre‐scale head motion. Adaptive correction is a strategy to adjust the imaging plane in response to measured head motion, thereby suppressing motion artifacts. This strategy should correct for motion in all six degrees of freedom and also holds promise for through‐plane motion that creates “spin‐history” artifact that cannot easily be removed by postprocessing methods. Improved quantitative understanding of the MRI signal behavior associated with spin‐history artifact would be useful for implementing adaptive correction robustly. Methods: A numerical simulation was developed to predict MRI artifact signal amplitude in a single‐slice for simple motions, implemented with and without adaptive correction, and compared with experiment by imaging a phantom at 3.0 T. Functional MRI was also performed of a human volunteer to illustrate adaptive correction in the presence of spin‐history artifact. Results: Good agreement was achieved between simulation and experimental results. Although time‐averaged artifact signal amplitude was observed to correlate linearly with motion speed, artifact time‐courses were nonlinearly related to motion waveforms. In addition, experimental results demonstrated effective adaptive correction of spin‐history artifact when the phantom underwent complex motions. Adaptive correction during human fMRI suppressed spin‐history artifacts and spurious activations associated with task‐correlated motion. Conclusions: Overall, this work suggests that adaptive correction, especially when implemented with minimal lag between motion measurement and scan plane update, may help to expand the populations for which fMRI can be performed robustly.