Improved adaptive reconstruction of multichannel MR images.

DeepcomplexMRI: Exploiting deep residual network for fast parallel MR imaging with complex convolution

With increasing resolutions and number of acquisitions, medical imaging more and more requires computer support for interpretation as currently not all imaging data is fully used. In our work we show how multi-channel images can be used for robust air masking and reliable muscle tissue detection in human subjects. We exploit additional channels that are usually discarded in clinical routine. We use the common mDixon acquisition protocol for MR imaging. A series of thresholding, morphological and connectivity operations is used for processing. We demonstrate our approach on two subjects and present a comparison with manual labeling. We discuss how this work is used for advanced and intuitive visualization, the quantification of tissue types, pose estimation, initialization of further segmentation methods and how it could be used in clinical environments.

In order to solve the geometric offset caused by replacing the filter during imaging of multichannel spectral image data, a multichannel spectral image registration method based on SURF feature merged with maximum submatrix is proposed. Firstly, the feature of multichannel spectral image is extracted by SURF. Then, a perspective transformation is performed to obtain a preliminary registration image. For the problem of invalid areas with zero pixel values appearing at the boundary of the image after registration, the largest submatrix is used to detect the maximum inscribed rectangle of the image to remove the invalid boundary region, and maximize the reserved effective region information. Experimented was processed with multichannel imaging data of murals. Experimental results agree with the theoretic analysis and verified that the proposed registration method is better adapted to image scale and brightness changing. At the same time, it can avoid the influence of invalid regions generated by other registration methods on subsequent spectral reconstruction and color restoration which has better performance.

An approach to Magnetic Resonance (MR) image reconstruction from undersampled data is proposed. Undersampling artifacts are removed using an iterative thresholding algorithm applied to nonlinearly transformed image block arrays. Each block array is transformed using kernel principal component analysis where the contribution of each image block to the transform depends in a nonlinear fashion on the distance to other image blocks. Elimination of undersampling artifacts is achieved by conventional principal component analysis in the nonlinear transform domain, projection onto the main components and back-mapping into the image domain. Iterative image reconstruction is performed by interleaving the proposed undersampling artifact removal step and gradient updates enforcing consistency with acquired k-space data. The algorithm is evaluated using retrospectively undersampled MR cardiac cine data and compared to k-t SPARSE-SENSE, block matching with spatial Fourier filtering and k-t ℓ1-SPIRiT reconstruction. Evaluation of image quality and root-mean-squared-error (RMSE) reveal improved image reconstruction for up to 8-fold undersampled data with the proposed approach relative to k-t SPARSE-SENSE, block matching with spatial Fourier filtering and k-t ℓ1-SPIRiT. In conclusion, block matching and kernel methods can be used for effective removal of undersampling artifacts in MR image reconstruction and outperform methods using standard compressed sensing and ℓ1-regularized parallel imaging methods.

Multichannel near-infrared (NIR)-II imaging provides more precise and detailed information for studying complex biological processes. When studying specific biological processes, a separated single signal and multisignals are essential but difficult to obtain by traditional multichannel NIR-II imaging methods. Taking advantage of the unique optical properties of lanthanide ions, especially in atom-like absorbance and emission spectroscopy in the NIR region, in this study, we synthesized two lanthanide-doped nanoprobes, NaYF4:Gd@NaYF4:Nd@NaYF4 (cssNd) and NaYF4:Gd@NaYF4:Er@NaYF4 (cssEr). These two nanoprobes show orthogonal NIR-II emissions (1064 and 1330 nm for cssNd and 1550 nm for cssEr) under 730 and 980 nm excitation, respectively. The feasibility of cssNd and cssEr for multichannel NIR-II imaging was proven in vitro. Under different methods of administering the nanoprobes, in vivo multichannel NIR-II imaging with both the separated single signal and multisignals was successfully performed and could spatially distinguish tissues under two different excitation sources. Our results provide a new method for multichannel NIR-II imaging with separable signals, which is promising for precisely studying complex biological processes precisely.

In clinical exams, multi-contrast images from conventional MRI are scanned with the same field of view (FOV) for complementary diagnostic information, such as proton density- (PD-), T1- and T2-weighted images. Their sharable information can be utilized for more robust and accurate image reconstruction. In this work, we propose a novel model and an efficient algorithm for joint image reconstruction and coil sensitivity estimation in multi-contrast partially parallel imaging (PPI) in MRI. Our algorithm restores the multi-contrast images by minimizing an energy function consisting of an L2-norm fidelity term to reduce construction errors caused by motion, a regularization term of underlying images to preserve common anatomical features by using vectorial total variation (VTV) regularizer, and updating sensitivity maps by Tikhonov smoothness based on their physical property. We present the numerical results including T1- and T2-weighted MR images recovered from partially scanned k-space data and provide the comparisons between our results and those obtained from the related existing works. Our numerical results indicate that the proposed method using vectorial TV and penalties on sensitivities can be made promising and widely used for multi-contrast multi-channel MR image reconstruction.

Reconstruction of magnetic resonance images (MRIs) by backprojection, which commonly uses techniques analogous to those employed for X-ray computed tomography, is discussed. The recently developed method of linogram reconstruction, an alternative to conventional/backprojection methods of reconstruction from projections, has been adapted for MRI, taking advantage of MRI's flexibility in choosing projection geometry. By avoiding the computationally intensive interpolations required for backprojection, linograms offer significant savings in reconstruction time over conventional backprojection and may offer a slight improvement in resolution as well.

This paper introduces an efficient algorithm for magnetic resonance (MR) image reconstruction. The proposed method minimizes a linear combination of nonlocal total variation and least-square data-fitting term to reconstruct the MR images from undersampled k-space data. The nonlocal total variation is taken as the L 1-regularization functional and solved using Split Bregman iteration. The proposed algorithm is compared with previous methods in terms of the reconstruction accuracy and computational complexity. The comparison results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm for compressed MR image reconstruction.

Incorporating reference guided priors into calibrationless parallel imaging reconstruction

To obtain a high-resolution and wide-swath image, the azimuth multichannel technique has been widely used in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems to overcome the contradiction between the wide swath and high pulse repetition frequency. For a high image quality, channel mismatch correction is an essential step in the multichannel SAR data imaging. However, in the case of airborne multichannel SAR, motion errors will severely degrade the performance of channel mismatch correction. To deal with this problem, this article proposes an improved airborne multichannel SAR imaging method with motion compensation, and range-variant channel mismatch correction. First, motion errors are compensated based on resampling and phase compensation. Then, the time-delay and constant gain-phase errors between channels are estimated and corrected, followed by the range-variant phase error correction based on a novel range-down-sampling method, which reduces the influence of motion errors on the channel mismatch correction significantly. Finally, simulated and real data processing results are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Regularized iterative reconstruction algorithms for imaging inverse problems require selection of appropriate regularization parameter values. We focus on the challenging problem of tuning regularization parameters for nonlinear algorithms for the case of additive (possibly complex) Gaussian noise. Generalized cross-validation (GCV) and (weighted) mean-squared error (MSE) approaches (based on Steinfs Unbiased Risk Estimate. SURE) need the Jacobian matrix of the nonlinear reconstruction operator (representative of the iterative algorithm) with respect to the data. We derive the desired Jacobian matrix for two types of nonlinear iterative algorithms: a fast variant of the standard iterative reweighted least-squares method and the contemporary split-Bregman algorithm, both of which can accommodate a wide variety of analysis- and synthesis-type regularizers. The proposed approach iteratively computes two weighted SURE-type measures: Predicted-SURE and Projected-SURE (that require knowledge of noise variance Ð2), and GCV (that does not need Ð2) for these algorithms. We apply the methods to image restoration and to magnetic resonance image (MRI) reconstruction using total variation (TV) and an analysis-type .1-regularization. We demonstrate through simulations and experiments with real data that minimizing Predicted-SURE and Projected-SURE consistently lead to near-MSE-optimal reconstructions. We also observed that minimizing GCV yields reconstruction results that are near-MSE-optimal for image restoration and slightly suboptimal for MRI. Theoretical derivations in this work related to Jacobian matrix evaluations can be extended, in principle, to other types of regularizers and reconstruction algorithms.

Compressive sensing magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is aimed at achieving high-quality MR image reconstruction by undersampling K-space data. It is crucial to explore prior information since compressive sensing MR imaging relies heavily on some prior assumptions, such as signal's sparse property. In this study, in order to explore the prior information fully, an improved MR image reconstruction model based on compressive sensing theory is proposed, named reference image MR imaging with adaptive tight frame. In the proposed model, an adaptive tight frame is involved to explore the sparse prior information adapt to MR images and the similarity prior information to the target image. Meanwhile, improved adaptive weighting parameters are used to trade off the sparsity between the regions with much similarity and that of little similarity. In addition, the smoothing-based fast iterative shrinkage-threshold algorithm is utilised to tackle the optimisation problem so as to speed up imaging. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MR image reconstruction method outperforms some state-of-the-art methods in terms of quantitative results.

Deals with magnetic resonance image reconstruction from non-uniformly sampled data. The authors' reconstruction method is based on a general formalism for finding the pseudoinverse of a linear mapping between two Hilbert spaces. The direct use of this general formalism implies the inversion of very large matrices, which results in numerical instabilities and extremely long calculation times. It is shown that these problems can be overcome by applying a sparse approximation of the matrices that are involved.

The deep learning method is an efficient solution for improving the quality of undersampled magnetic resonance (MR) image reconstruction while reducing lengthy data acquisition. Most deep learning methods neglect the mutual constraints between the real and imaginary components of complex-valued k-space data. In this paper, a new complex-valued convolutional neural network, namely, Dense-U-Dense Net (DUD-Net), is proposed to interpolate the undersampled k-space data and reconstruct MR images. The proposed network comprises dense layers, U-Net, and other dense layers in sequence. The dense layers are used to simulate the mutual constraints between real and imaginary components, and U-Net performs feature sparsity and interpolation estimation for k-space data. Two MRI datasets were used to evaluate the proposed method: brain magnitude-only MR images and knee complex-valued k-space data. Several operations were conducted for data preprocessing. First, the complex-valued MR images were synthesized by phase modulation on magnitude-only images. Second, a radial trajectory based on the golden angle was used for k-space undersampling, whereby a reversible normalization method was proposed to balance the distribution of positive and negative values in k-space data. The optimal performance of DUD-Net was demonstrated based on a quantitative evaluation of inter-method and intra-method comparisons. When compared with other methods, significant improvements were achieved, PSNRs were increased by 10.78 and 5.74dB, whereas RMSEs were decreased by 71.53% and 30.31% for magnitude and phase image, respectively. It is concluded that DUD-Net significantly improves the performance of MR image reconstruction.

The development of compressed sensing methods for magnetic resonance (MR) image reconstruction led to an explosion of research on models and optimization algorithms for MR imaging (MRI). Roughly 10 years after such methods first appeared in the MRI literature, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved certain compressed sensing methods for commercial use, making compressed sensing a clinical success story for MRI. This review paper summarizes several key models and optimization algorithms for MR image reconstruction, including both the type of methods that have FDA approval for clinical use, as well as more recent methods being considered in the research community that use data-adaptive regularizers. Many algorithms have been devised that exploit the structure of the system model and regularizers used in MRI; this paper strives to collect such algorithms in a single survey.