Scan-Adaptive MRI Undersampling Using Neighbor-based Optimization (SUNO)

TL;DR

This paper introduces SUNO, a novel framework for scan-adaptive MRI undersampling that learns personalized sampling patterns and reconstruction models, improving image quality at high acceleration factors.

Contribution

The proposed SUNO framework jointly learns scan-specific sampling patterns and reconstruction models using an iterative optimization and neighbor search, outperforming existing methods.

Findings

Improved image quality at 4x and 8x acceleration factors.

Enhanced performance over standard undersampling patterns.

Applicable to multi-coil knee and brain MRI datasets.

Abstract

Accelerated MRI involves collecting partial $k$-space measurements to reduce acquisition time, patient discomfort, and motion artifacts, and typically uses regular undersampling patterns or human-designed schemes. Recent works have studied population-adaptive sampling patterns learned from a group of patients (or scans). However, such patterns can be sub-optimal for individual scans, as they may fail to capture scan or slice-specific details, and their effectiveness can depend on the size and composition of the population. To overcome this issue, we propose a framework for jointly learning scan-adaptive Cartesian undersampling patterns and a corresponding reconstruction model from a training set. We use an alternating algorithm for learning the sampling patterns and the reconstruction model where we use an iterative coordinate descent (ICD) based offline optimization of scan-adaptive $k$-space sampling patterns for each example in the training set. A nearest neighbor search is then used to select the scan-adaptive sampling pattern at test time from initially acquired low-frequency $k$-space information. We applied the proposed framework (dubbed SUNO) to the fastMRI multi-coil knee and brain datasets, demonstrating improved performance over the currently used undersampling patterns at both $4\times$ and $8\times$ acceleration factors in terms of both visual quality and quantitative metrics. The code for the proposed framework is available at https://github.com/sidgautam95/adaptive-sampling-mri-suno. This paper has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging. The final published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1109/TCI.2026.3653330.