A deep cascade of ensemble of dual domain networks with gradient-based T1 assistance and perceptual refinement for fast MRI reconstruction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deep cascade ensemble of dual domain networks with T1 assistance and perceptual refinement to significantly improve fast MRI reconstruction quality, achieving state-of-the-art results in various settings.

Contribution

It proposes novel network architectures combining image and Fourier domain processing, T1 assistance via GOLF fusion, and perceptual refinement, advancing MRI reconstruction methods.

Findings

Achieved high SSIM scores on fastMRI datasets for various MRI types.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of T1 assistance in improving reconstruction quality.

Validated state-of-the-art performance of the proposed models.

Abstract

Deep learning networks have shown promising results in fast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction. In our work, we develop deep networks to further improve the quantitative and the perceptual quality of reconstruction. To begin with, we propose reconsynergynet (RSN), a network that combines the complementary benefits of independently operating on both the image and the Fourier domain. For a single-coil acquisition, we introduce deep cascade RSN (DC-RSN), a cascade of RSN blocks interleaved with data fidelity (DF) units. Secondly, we improve the structure recovery of DC-RSN for T2 weighted Imaging (T2WI) through assistance of T1 weighted imaging (T1WI), a sequence with short acquisition time. T1 assistance is provided to DC-RSN through a gradient of log feature (GOLF) fusion. Furthermore, we propose perceptual refinement network (PRN) to refine the reconstructions for better visual information fidelity (VIF), a metric highly correlated to radiologists opinion on the image quality. Lastly, for multi-coil acquisition, we propose variable splitting RSN (VS-RSN), a deep cascade of blocks, each block containing RSN, multi-coil DF unit, and a weighted average module. We extensively validate our models DC-RSN and VS-RSN for single-coil and multi-coil acquisitions and report the state-of-the-art performance. We obtain a SSIM of 0.768, 0.923, 0.878 for knee single-coil-4x, multi-coil-4x, and multi-coil-8x in fastMRI. We also conduct experiments to demonstrate the efficacy of GOLF based T1 assistance and PRN.