Iterative off-resonance and signal decay estimation and correction for multi-echo MRI

Signal dephasing due to field inhomogeneity and signal decay due to transverse relaxation lead to perturbations of the Fourier encoding commonly applied in magnetic resonance imaging. Hence, images acquired with long readouts suffer from artifacts such as blurring, distortion, and intensity variation. These artifacts can be removed in reconstruction, usually based on separately collected information in form of field and relaxation maps. In this work, a recently proposed gridding-based algorithm for off-resonance correction is extended to also address signal decay. It is integrated into a new fixed-point iteration, which permits the joint estimation of an image and field and relaxation maps from multi-echo acquisitions. This approach is then applied in simulations and in vivo experiments and demonstrated to improve both images and maps. The rapid convergence of the fixed-point iteration in combination with the efficient gridding-based correction promises to render the running time of such a joint estimation acceptable.