Edge-enhanced spatiotemporal constrained reconstruction of undersampled dynamic contrast-enhanced radial MRI

Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a technique used to study and track contrast kinetics in an area of interest in the body over time. Reconstruction of images with high contrast and sharp edges from undersampled data is a challenge. While good results have been reported using a radial acquisition and a spatiotemporal constrained reconstruction (STCR) method, we propose improvements from using spatially adaptive weighting and an additional edge-based constraint. The new method uses intensity gradients from a sliding window reference image to improve the sharpness of edges in the reconstructed image. The method was tested on eight radial cardiac perfusion data sets with 24 rays and compared to the STCR method. The reconstructions showed that the new method, termed edge-enhanced spatiotemporal constrained reconstruction, was able to reconstruct images with sharper edges, and there were a 36%±13.7% increase in contrast-to-noise ratio and a 24%±11% increase in contrast near the edges when compared to STCR. The novelty of this paper is the combination of spatially adaptive weighting for spatial total variation (TV) constraint along with a gradient matching term to improve the sharpness of edges. The edge map from a reference image allows the reconstruction to trade-off between TV and edge enhancement, depending on the spatially varying weighting provided by the edge map.     

Stationary wavelet transform for under-sampled MRI reconstruction

In addition to coil sensitivity data (parallel imaging), sparsity constraints are often used as an additional l_p-penalty for under-sampled MRI reconstruction (compressed sensing). Penalizing the traditional decimated wavelet transform (DWT) coefficients, however, results in visual pseudo-Gibbs artifacts, some of which are attributed to the lack of translation invariance of the wavelet basis. We show that these artifacts can be greatly reduced by penalizing the translation-invariant stationary wavelet transform (SWT) coefficients. This holds with various additional reconstruction constraints, including coil sensitivity profiles and total variation. Additionally, SWT reconstructions result in lower error values and faster convergence compared to DWT. These concepts are illustrated with extensive experiments on in vivo MRI data with particular emphasis on multiple-channel acquisitions.     

Fast multi-contrast MRI reconstruction

Multi-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a useful technique to aid clinical diagnosis. This paper proposes an efficient algorithm to jointly reconstruct multiple T1/T2-weighted images of the same anatomical cross section from partially sampled k-space data. The joint reconstruction problem is formulated as minimizing a linear combination of three terms, corresponding to a least squares data fitting, joint total variation (TV) and group wavelet-sparsity regularization. It is rooted in two observations: 1) the variance of image gradients should be similar for the same spatial position across multiple contrasts; 2) the wavelet coefficients of all images from the same anatomical cross section should have similar sparse modes. To efficiently solve this problem, we decompose it into joint TV regularization and group sparsity subproblems, respectively. Finally, the reconstructed image is obtained from the weighted average of solutions from the two subproblems, in an iterative framework. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method compared to existing multi-contrast MRI methods.     

Motion predicted online dynamic MRI reconstruction from partially sampled k-space data

In this work we address the problem of reconstructing dynamic MRI sequences in an online fashion, i.e. reconstructing the current frame given that the previous frames have been already reconstructed. The reconstruction consists of a prediction and a correction step. The prediction step is based on an Auto-Regressive AR(1) model. Assuming that the prediction is good, the difference between the predicted frame and the actual frame (to be reconstructed) will be sparse. In the correction step, the difference between the predicted frame and the actual frame is estimated from partially sampled K-space data via a sparsity promoting least squares minimization problem. We have compared the proposed method with state-of-the-art methods in online dynamic MRI reconstruction. The experiments have been carried out on 2D and 3D Dynamic Contrast Enhanced (DCE) MRI datasets. Results show that our method yields the least reconstruction error.     

Undersampled MRI reconstruction with patch-based directional wavelets

Compressed sensing has shown great potential in reducing data acquisition time in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In traditional compressed sensing MRI methods, an image is reconstructed by enforcing its sparse representation with respect to a preconstructed basis or dictionary. In this paper, patch-based directional wavelets are proposed to reconstruct images from undersampled k-space data. A parameter of patch-based directional wavelets, indicating the geometric direction of each patch, is trained from the reconstructed image using conventional compressed sensing MRI methods and incorporated into the sparsifying transform to provide the sparse representation for the image to be reconstructed. A reconstruction formulation is proposed and solved via an efficient alternating direction algorithm. Simulation results on phantom and in vivo data indicate that the proposed method outperforms conventional compressed sensing MRI methods in preserving the edges and suppressing the noise. Besides, the proposed method is not sensitive to the initial image when training directions.     

Adaptive fixed-point iterative shrinkage/thresholding algorithm for MR imaging reconstruction using compressed sensing

Recently compressed sensing (CS) has been applied to under-sampling MR image reconstruction for significantly reducing signal acquisition time. To guarantee the accuracy and efficiency of the CS-based MR image reconstruction, it necessitates determining several regularization and algorithm-introduced parameters properly in practical implementations. The regularization parameter is used to control the trade-off between the sparsity of MR image and the fidelity measures of k-space data, and thus has an important effect on the reconstructed image quality. The algorithm-introduced parameters determine the global convergence rate of the algorithm itself. These parameters make CS-based MR image reconstruction a more difficult scheme than traditional Fourier-based method while implemented on a clinical MR scanner. In this paper, we propose a new approach that reveals that the regularization parameter can be taken as a threshold in a fixed-point iterative shrinkage/thresholding algorithm (FPIST) and chosen by employing minimax threshold selection method. No extra parameter is introduced by FPIST. The simulation results on synthetic and real complex-valued MRI data show that the proposed method can adaptively choose the regularization parameter and effectively achieve high reconstruction quality. The proposed method should prove very useful for practical CS-based MRI applications.     

Non-convex algorithm for sparse and low-rank recovery: Application to dynamic MRI reconstruction

In this work we exploit two assumed properties of dynamic MRI in order to reconstruct the images from under-sampled K-space samples. The first property assumes the signal is sparse in the x-f space and the second property assumes the signal is rank-deficient in the x-t space. These assumptions lead to an optimization problem that requires minimizing a combined l_p-norm and Schatten-p norm. We propose a novel FOCUSS based approach to solve the optimization problem. Our proposed method is compared with state-of-the-art techniques in dynamic MRI reconstruction. Experimental evaluation carried out on three real datasets shows that for all these datasets, our method yields better reconstruction both in quantitative and qualitative evaluation.     

Causal dynamic MRI reconstruction via nuclear norm minimization

This work addresses the problem of online reconstruction of dynamic magnetic resonance images (MRI). The proposed method reconstructs the difference between the images of previous and current time frames. This difference image is modeled as a rank deficient matrix and is solved from the partially sampled k-space data via nuclear norm minimization. Our proposed method has been compared against state-of-the-art offline and online reconstruction methods. Our method has similar reconstruction accuracy as the offline method and significantly higher accuracy compared to the online technique. It is about an order of magnitude faster than the online technique compared against. Our experimental data consisted of dynamic MRI data that were collected at 6 to 7 frames per second and having resolutions of 128×128 and 256×256 pixels per frame. Experimental evaluation indicates that our proposed method is capable of reconstructing 128×128 images at the rate of 4 frames per second and 256×256 images at the rate of 2 frames per second. The previous online method requires about 3.75 s for reconstructing each image. The improvement in reconstruction speed is clearly discernible. Moreover, our method has a reconstruction error that is about half that of the previous online method.     

基于联合正则化及压缩传感的MRI图像重构

基于压缩传感的MRI图像重构利用图像稀疏的先验知识能从很少的投影值重构原图像。目前MRI重构算法只利用MRI图像稀疏性表示或只利用基于其局部光滑性的先验知识,重构效果不理想。针对此问题,结合两种先验知识,提出一种基于联合正则化及压缩传感的MRI图像重构方法。利用块坐标下降法将求解联合正则化问题转化为交替求解二次凸优化、稀疏正则化和全变差正则化三个简单的优化问题。并提出分别采用共轭梯度法、二元自适应收缩法以及梯度下降法对以上优化问题求解。实验结果表明,该算法重构效果比现有算法有明显地提高。     

Nonlocal regularization based on DT-CWT for WMSN video image iterative reconstruction

The prior knowledge of signal is the previous condition of image compressed sensing reconstruction. In order to improve the quality of the priors except for image sparsity, this paper proposes a new model of video image reconstruction. The texture is the important visual feature of video image as a result of its repeat, leading to image global geometrical structures. The nonlocal idea comes from image self-familiar and can represent image detail features from the geometrical point of view. Therefore, the texture geometrical feature of video image is researched, and we take advantage of dual-tree complex wavelet transform to portray the sparsity representation regularization of the texture. What is more, global constrained regularization is constructed with the help of the nonlocal idea. On the basis of the two regularizations above, a new reconstruction model of video image compressed sensing is proposed, which not only preserves the sparsity prior knowledge of image but also improves the quality of prior knowledge of image by promoting geometrical structure. Iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm is adopted to solve the model leading to a both simple and quick iterative algorithm. Numerical experiments show that our method is efficient for video image recovery, especially preserving the global details of the original video image.     

Exploiting rank deficiency and transform domain sparsity for MR image reconstruction

The reconstruction of magnetic resonance (MR) images from the partial samples of their k-space data using compressed sensing (CS)-based methods has generated a lot of interest in recent years. To reconstruct the MR images, these techniques exploit the sparsity of the image in a transform domain (wavelets, total variation, etc.). In a recent work, it has been shown that it is also possible to reconstruct MR images by exploiting their rank deficiency. In this work, it will be shown that, instead of exploiting the sparsity of the image or rank deficiency alone, better reconstruction results can be achieved by combining transform domain sparsity with rank deficiency.To reconstruct an MR image using its transform domain sparsity and its rank deficiency, this work proposes a combined l₁-norm (of the transform coefficients) and nuclear norm (of the MR image matrix) minimization problem. Since such an optimization problem has not been encountered before, this work proposes and derives a first-order algorithm to solve it.The reconstruction results show that the proposed approach yields significant improvements, in terms of both visual quality as well as the signal to noise ratio, over previous works that reconstruct MR images either by exploiting rank deficiency or by the standard CS-based technique popularly known as the ‘Sparse MRI.’     

Visually weighted reconstruction of compressive sensing MRI

Compressive sensing (CS) enables the reconstruction of a magnetic resonance (MR) image from undersampled data in k-space with relatively low-quality distortion when compared to the original image. In addition, CS allows the scan time to be significantly reduced. Along with a reduction in the computational overhead, we investigate an effective way to improve visual quality through the use of a weighted optimization algorithm for reconstruction after variable density random undersampling in the phase encoding direction over k-space. In contrast to conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction methods, the visual weight, in particular, the region of interest (ROI), is investigated here for quality improvement. In addition, we employ a wavelet transform to analyze the reconstructed image in the space domain and fully utilize data sparsity over the spatial and frequency domains. The visual weight is constructed by reflecting the perceptual characteristics of the human visual system (HVS), and then applied to ?₁ norm minimization, which gives priority to each coefficient during the reconstruction process. Using objective quality assessment metrics, it was found that an image reconstructed using the visual weight has higher local and global quality than those processed by conventional methods.