A Theoretically Guaranteed Deep Optimization Framework for Robust Compressive Sensing MRI

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is one of the most dynamic and safe imaging techniques available for clinical applications. However, the rather slow speed of MRI acquisitions limits the patient throughput and potential indi cations. Compressive Sensing (CS) has proven to be an efficient technique for accelerating MRI acquisition. The most widely used CS-MRI model, founded on the premise of reconstructing an image from an incompletely filled k-space, leads to an ill-posed inverse problem. In the past years, lots of efforts have been made to efficiently optimize the CS-MRI model. Inspired by deep learning techniques, some preliminary works have tried to incorporate deep architectures into CS-MRI process. Unfortunately, the convergence issues (due to the experience-based networks) and the robustness (i.e., lack real-world noise modeling) of these deeply trained optimization methods are still missing. In this work, we develop a new paradigm to integrate designed numerical solvers and the data-driven architectures for CS-MRI. By introducing an optimal condition checking mechanism, we can successfully prove the convergence of our established deep CS-MRI optimization scheme. Furthermore, we explicitly formulate the Rician noise distributions within our framework and obtain an extended CS-MRI network to handle the real-world nosies in the MRI process. Extensive experimental results verify that the proposed paradigm outperforms the existing state-of-the-art techniques both in reconstruction accuracy and efficiency as well as robustness to noises in real scene

Continuous-Domain Solutions of Linear Inverse Problems with Tikhonov vs. Generalized TV Regularization

We consider linear inverse problems that are formulated in the continuous domain. The object of recovery is a function that is assumed to minimize a convex objective functional. The solutions are constrained by imposing a continuous-domain regularization. We derive the parametric form of the solution (representer theorems) for Tikhonov (quadratic) and generalized total-variation (gTV) regularizations. We show that, in both cases, the solutions are splines that are intimately related to the regularization operator. In the Tikhonov case, the solution is smooth and constrained to live in a fixed subspace that depends on the measurement operator. By contrast, the gTV regularization results in a sparse solution composed of only a few dictionary elements that are upper-bounded by the number of measurements and independent of the measurement operator. Our findings for the gTV regularization resonates with the minimization of the $l_1$ norm, which is its discrete counterpart and also produces sparse solutions. Finally, we find the experimental solutions for some measurement models in one dimension. We discuss the special case when the gTV regularization results in multiple solutions and devise an algorithm to find an extreme point of the solution set which is guaranteed to be sparse