Results showed significant volume reductions in key regions of the executive control, salience, and emotion networks in ALC at entry into treatment and significant volume increases during short-term and long-term abstinence that were nonlinear over the entire abstinence period for the DLPFC, OFC, and insula. This gray matter plasticity during alcohol abstinence may have important neurobiological and neurocognitive implications in ALC, and it may contribute to an individual's ability to maintain abstinence from alcohol at different phases.

Despite rigid-body realignment to compensate for head motion during an echo-planar imaging (EPI) time-series scan, non-rigid image deformations remain due to changes in the effective shim within the brain as the head moves through the B0 field. The current work presents a combined prospective/retrospective solution to reduce both rigid and non-rigid components of this motion-related image misalignment. Prospective rigid-body correction, where the scan-plane orientation is dynamically updated to track with the subject’s head, is performed using an active marker setup. Retrospective distortion correction is then applied to unwarp the remaining non-rigid image deformations caused by motion-induced field changes. Distortion correction relative to a reference time-frame does not require any additional field mapping scans or models, but rather uses the phase information from the EPI time-series itself. This combined method is applied to compensate EPI scans of volunteers performing in-plane and through-plane head motions, resulting in increased image stability beyond what either prospective or retrospective rigid-body correction alone can achieve. The combined method is also assessed in a BOLD fMRI task, resulting in improved Z-score statistics.