Optimized Multi-Contrast Self-Supervised MRI Reconstruction using Learned k-space Partitioning

Objective: Deep Learning has shown promise in accelerating MRI by reconstructing high-quality images from under-sampled data. While recent work has leveraged multi-contrast information to improve reconstruction performance, these methods rely on supervised learning, which requires fully sampled k-space for training. One method, self-supervised learning via data undersampling (SSDU), enables direct training on under-sampled k-space by partitioning it into two sets, with a network mapping between the two. In this work, we improve MRI self-supervised MRI reconstruction with two modifications. Methods: We propose a multi-contrast self-supervised learning framework that jointly trains on multiple under-sampled contrasts without requiring fully sampled k-space data as a reference. Moreover, we learn an optimal self-supervised data partitioning for each contrast in an end-to-end manner, further enhancing reconstruction quality. Specifically, we learn an optimal partitioning probability distribution, which is sampled to generate a mask for partitioning. Results: Experiments on two publicly available multi-contrast MRI datasets demonstrate the improved reconstruction quality of our proposed self-supervised multi-contrast learned partitioning method compared to the current single-contrast self-supervised learning methods. We also demonstrate that learning the partitioning of k-space data further enhances the fidelity of reconstructions. Conclusion: Multi-contrast reconstruction combined with learned partitioning improves reconstruction fidelity over single-contrast self-supervised MRI reconstructions. Significance: Our method can facilitate higher image fidelity and/or accelerated MRI protocol times compared to previous self-supervised methods, and without requiring fully sampled k-space for training.