Verifying the concordance between motion corrected and conventional MPRAGE for pediatric morphometric analysis

Barat Gal-Er¹Yannick Brackenier²Alexandra F Bonthrone¹Chiara Casella³Anthony Price²Sophie Arulkumaran¹Andrew T.M Chew¹Chiara Nosarti⁴Michela Cleri⁵Pierluigi Di Cio⁵Alexia Egloff¹Mary Ann Rutherford¹Jonathan O'Muircheartaigh¹Raphael Tomi-Tricot^6,7Shaihan Malik²Lucilio Cordero-Grande^2,8Joseph Hajnal²Serena Counsell^1*

• ¹Research Department of Early Life Imaging, School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences, King's College London, London, United Kingdom
• ²Research Department of Imaging Physics & Engineering, School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences, King's College London, London, United Kingdom
• ³Research Department of Early Life Imaging, School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences; Department for Forensic and Neurodevelopmental Sciences, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience,, King's College London, London, United Kingdom
• ⁴Research Department of Early Life Imaging, School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences; Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, London, United Kingdom
• ⁵School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences, King's College London, London, United Kingdom
• ⁶Research Department of Imaging Physics & Engineering, School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences,, King's College London, London, United Kingdom
• ⁷MR Research Collaborations, Siemens (United Kingdom), Camberley, United Kingdom
• ⁸Biomedical Image Technologies, ETSI Telecomunicación, Politécnica de Madrid and CIBER-BNN, Madrid, Spain

This study aimed to validate a retrospective motion correction technique, Distributed and Incoherent Sample Orders for Reconstruction Deblurring using Encoding Redundancy (DISORDER), for pediatric brain morphometry.Two T1-weighted MPRAGE 3D datasets were acquired at 3T in thirty-seven children aged 7-8 years: one with conventional linear phase encoding and one using DISORDER. MPRAGE images were scored as motion-free or motion-corrupt.Cortical morphometry and regional brain volumes were measured with FreeSurfer, subcortical grey matter (GM) with FSL-FIRST, and hippocampi with HippUnfold.Intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was used to determine agreement. Mann-Whitney U was used to test the difference between measures obtained using DISORDER and (i) motion-free and (ii) motion-corrupt conventional MPRAGE data.ICC measures between conventional MPRAGE and DISORDER data were good/excellent for most subcortical GM (motion-free, 0.75-0.96; motion-corrupt, 0.62-0.98) and regional brain volumes (motion-free 0.47-0.99; motion-corrupt, 0.54-0.99), except for the amygdala and nucleus accumbens (motion-free, 0.38-0.65; motioncorrupt, 0.1-0.42). These values were less consistent for motion-corrupt conventional MPRAGE data for hippocampal volumes (motion-free 0.65-0.99; motion-corrupt, 0.11-0.91) and cortical measures (motion-free 0.76-0.98; motion-corrupt, 0.09-0.74).Mann-Whitney U showed percentage differences in measures obtained with motioncorrupt conventional MPRAGE compared to DISORDER data were significantly greater than in those obtained using motion-free conventional MPRAGE data in 22/58 structures.In the absence of motion, morphometric measures obtained using DISORDER are largely consistent with those from conventional MPRAGE data, whereas improved