Simultaneous use of Individual and Joint Regularization Terms in Compressive Sensing: Joint Reconstruction of Multi-Channel Multi-Contrast MRI Acquisitions

Purpose: A time-efficient strategy to acquire high-quality multi-contrast images is to reconstruct undersampled data with joint regularization terms that leverage common information across contrasts. However, these terms can cause leakage of uncommon features among contrasts, compromising diagnostic utility. The goal of this study is to develop a compressive sensing method for multi-channel multi-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that optimally utilizes shared information while preventing feature leakage. Theory: Joint regularization terms group sparsity and colour total variation are used to exploit common features across images while individual sparsity and total variation are also used to prevent leakage of distinct features across contrasts. The multi-channel multi-contrast reconstruction problem is solved via a fast algorithm based on Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers. Methods: The proposed method is compared against using only individual and only joint regularization terms in reconstruction. Comparisons were performed on single-channel simulated and multi-channel in-vivo datasets in terms of reconstruction quality and neuroradiologist reader scores. Results: The proposed method demonstrates rapid convergence and improved image quality for both simulated and in-vivo datasets. Furthermore, while reconstructions that solely use joint regularization terms are prone to leakage-of-features, the proposed method reliably avoids leakage via simultaneous use of joint and individual terms. Conclusion: The proposed compressive sensing method performs fast reconstruction of multi-channel multi-contrast MRI data with improved image quality. It offers reliability against feature leakage in joint reconstructions, thereby holding great promise for clinical use.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figures. Submitted for possible publicatio

Joint reconstruction of multi-contrast images: compressive sensing reconstruction using both joint and individual regularization functions

In many clinical settings, multi-contrast images of a patient are acquired to maximize complementary information. With the underlying anatomy being the same, the mutual information in multi-contrast data can be exploited to improve image reconstruction, especially in accelerated acquisition schemes such as Compressive Sensing (CS). This study proposes a CS-reconstruction algorithm that uses four regularization functions; joint L1-sparsity and TV-regularization terms to exploit the mutual information, and individual L1-sparsity and TV-regularization terms to recover unique features in each image. The proposed method is shown to be robust against leakage-of-features across contrasts, and is demonstrated using simulations and in-vivo experiments

Statistically segregated k-space sampling for accelerating multiple-acquisition MRI

A central limitation of multiple-acquisition magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the degradation in scan efficiency as the number of distinct datasets grows. Sparse recovery techniques can alleviate this limitation via randomly undersampled acquisitions. A frequent sampling strategy is to prescribe for each acquisition a different random pattern drawn from a common sampling density. However, naive random patterns often contain gaps or clusters across the acquisition dimension that in turn can degrade reconstruction quality or reduce scan efficiency. To address this problem, a statistically-segregated sampling method is proposed for multiple-acquisition MRI. This method generates multiple patterns sequentially, while adaptively modifying the sampling density to minimize k-space overlap across patterns. As a result, it improves incoherence across acquisitions while still maintaining similar sampling density across the radial dimension of k-space. Comprehensive simulations and in vivo results are presented for phase-cycled balanced steady-state free precession and multi-echo T2-weighted imaging. Segregated sampling achieves significantly improved quality in both Fourier and compressedsensing reconstructions of multiple-acquisition datasets