An Unsupervised Deep Learning Method for Multi-coil Cine MRI

TL;DR

This paper introduces an unsupervised deep learning approach for multi-coil cine MRI reconstruction that leverages a time-interleaved sampling strategy to improve image quality without requiring large fully sampled datasets.

Contribution

It proposes a novel unsupervised deep learning framework utilizing time-interleaved sampling to reconstruct multi-coil cine MRI without extensive fully sampled data.

Findings

Achieves improved reconstruction quality over traditional methods.

Operates with significantly reduced reconstruction time.

Effectively explores coil correlations through CNN.

Abstract

Deep learning has achieved good success in cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction, in which convolutional neural networks (CNNs) learn a mapping from the undersampled k-space to the fully sampled images. Although these deep learning methods can improve the reconstruction quality compared with iterative methods without requiring complex parameter selection or lengthy reconstruction time, the following issues still need to be addressed: 1) all these methods are based on big data and require a large amount of fully sampled MRI data, which is always difficult to obtain for cardiac MRI; 2) the effect of coil correlation on reconstruction in deep learning methods for dynamic MR imaging has never been studied. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised deep learning method for multi-coil cine MRI via a time-interleaved sampling strategy. Specifically, a time-interleaved acquisition scheme is utilized to build a set of fully encoded reference data by directly merging the k-space data of adjacent time frames. Then these fully encoded data can be used to train a parallel network for reconstructing images of each coil separately. Finally, the images from each coil are combined via a CNN to implicitly explore the correlations between coils. The comparisons with classic k-t FOCUSS, k-t SLR, L+S and KLR methods on in vivo datasets show that our method can achieve improved reconstruction results in an extremely short amount of time.