CRUNet-MR-Univ: A Foundation Model for Diverse Cardiac MRI Reconstruction

TL;DR

CRUNet-MR-Univ is a versatile foundation model designed to improve cardiac MRI reconstruction by generalizing across diverse scan types, contrast variations, and clinical scenarios, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

The paper introduces CRUNet-MR-Univ, a novel foundation model that leverages spatio-temporal correlations and prompt-based priors for broad generalization in cardiac MRI reconstruction.

Findings

Outperforms baseline methods across various CMR settings

Handles high acceleration factors effectively

Demonstrates robustness to distribution shifts

Abstract

In recent years, deep learning has attracted increasing attention in the field of Cardiac MRI (CMR) reconstruction due to its superior performance over traditional methods, particularly in handling higher acceleration factors, highlighting its potential for real-world clinical applications. However, current deep learning methods remain limited in generalizability. CMR scans exhibit wide variability in image contrast, sampling patterns, scanner vendors, anatomical structures, and disease types. Most existing models are designed to handle only a single or narrow subset of these variations, leading to performance degradation when faced with distribution shifts. Therefore, it is beneficial to develop a unified model capable of generalizing across diverse CMR scenarios. To this end, we propose CRUNet-MR-Univ, a foundation model that leverages spatio-temporal correlations and prompt-based priors to effectively handle the full diversity of CMR scans. Our approach consistently outperforms baseline methods across a wide range of settings, highlighting its effectiveness and promise.