7,208 research outputs found
Spatio-temporal wavelet regularization for parallel MRI reconstruction: application to functional MRI
Parallel MRI is a fast imaging technique that enables the acquisition of
highly resolved images in space or/and in time. The performance of parallel
imaging strongly depends on the reconstruction algorithm, which can proceed
either in the original k-space (GRAPPA, SMASH) or in the image domain
(SENSE-like methods). To improve the performance of the widely used SENSE
algorithm, 2D- or slice-specific regularization in the wavelet domain has been
deeply investigated. In this paper, we extend this approach using 3D-wavelet
representations in order to handle all slices together and address
reconstruction artifacts which propagate across adjacent slices. The gain
induced by such extension (3D-Unconstrained Wavelet Regularized -SENSE:
3D-UWR-SENSE) is validated on anatomical image reconstruction where no temporal
acquisition is considered. Another important extension accounts for temporal
correlations that exist between successive scans in functional MRI (fMRI). In
addition to the case of 2D+t acquisition schemes addressed by some other
methods like kt-FOCUSS, our approach allows us to deal with 3D+t acquisition
schemes which are widely used in neuroimaging. The resulting 3D-UWR-SENSE and
4D-UWR-SENSE reconstruction schemes are fully unsupervised in the sense that
all regularization parameters are estimated in the maximum likelihood sense on
a reference scan. The gain induced by such extensions is illustrated on both
anatomical and functional image reconstruction, and also measured in terms of
statistical sensitivity for the 4D-UWR-SENSE approach during a fast
event-related fMRI protocol. Our 4D-UWR-SENSE algorithm outperforms the SENSE
reconstruction at the subject and group levels (15 subjects) for different
contrasts of interest (eg, motor or computation tasks) and using different
parallel acceleration factors (R=2 and R=4) on 2x2x3mm3 EPI images.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1103.353
Spatial Smoothing for Diffusion Tensor Imaging with low Signal to Noise Ratios
Though low signal to noise ratio (SNR) experiments in DTI give key information about tracking and anisotropy, e.g. by measurements with very small voxel sizes, due to the complicated impact of thermal noise such experiments are up to now seldom analysed. In this paper Monte Carlo simulations are presented which investigate the random fields of noise for different DTI variables in low SNR situations. Based on this study a strategy for spatial smoothing, which demands essentially uniform noise, is derived. To construct a convenient filter the weights of the nonlinear Aurich chain are adapted to DTI. This edge preserving three dimensional filter is then validated in different variants via a quasi realistic model and is applied to very new data with isotropic voxels of the size 1x1x1 mm3 which correspond to a spatial mean SNR of approximately 3
- …