Training-Free Motion-Corrected 3D Brain MRI Reconstruction via Event-Guided References

Abstract

Head motion causes artefacts in 3D brain MRI and can bias structural measurements. Model-based correction alternates between image and motion estimation, but artefacts in the reconstructed reference can reinforce motion errors. Learned priors can reduce these artefacts but require pretraining and may add test-time computation. We propose EventMC (event-guided motion correction), a training-free method for interleaved Cartesian acquisitions. It iteratively detects motion events and estimates motion using reference images reconstructed from stable intervals. It then refines the image and motion from low to high spatial frequencies. In a fair comparison in simulation (same reconstruction), EventMC's motion estimates improve mean PSNR by up to 4.0 dB over those of the learning-based MotionTTT. A single run of EventMC is up to 7.5 times faster than MotionTTT with less than half the GPU memory. On in vivo motion-corrupted scans, EventMC achieves similar mean image quality to MotionTTT without any training. Code is available at https://github.com/bayesbreeze/EventMC.