Deep MR Fingerprinting with total-variation and low-rank subspace priors

Deep learning (DL) has recently emerged to address the heavy storage and computation requirements of the baseline dictionary-matching (DM) for Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF) reconstruction. Fed with non-iterated back-projected images, the network is unable to fully resolve spatially-correlated corruptions caused from the undersampling artefacts. We propose an accelerated iterative reconstruction to minimize these artefacts before feeding into the network. This is done through a convex regularization that jointly promotes spatio-temporal regularities of the MRF time-series. Except for training, the rest of the parameter estimation pipeline is dictionary-free. We validate the proposed approach on synthetic and in-vivo datasets.

Geometry of Deep Learning for Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting

Current popular methods for Magnetic Resonance Fingerprint (MRF) recovery are bottlenecked by the heavy storage and computation requirements of a dictionary-matching (DM) step due to the growing size and complexity of the fingerprint dictionaries in multi-parametric quantitative MRI applications. In this paper we study a deep learning approach to address these shortcomings. Coupled with a dimensionality reduction first layer, the proposed MRF-Net is able to reconstruct quantitative maps by saving more than 60 times in memory and computations required for a DM baseline. Fine-grid manifold enumeration i.e. the MRF dictionary is only used for training the network and not during image reconstruction. We show that the MRF-Net provides a piece-wise affine approximation to the Bloch response manifold projection and that rather than memorizing the dictionary, the network efficiently clusters this manifold and learns a set of hierarchical matched-filters for affine regression of the NMR characteristics in each segment.

Balanced multi-shot EPI for accelerated Cartesian MRF: An alternative to spiral MRF

The main purpose of this study is to show that a highly accelerated Cartesian MRF scheme using a multi-shot EPI readout (i.e. multi-shot EPI-MRF) can produce good quality multi-parametric maps such as T1, T2 and proton density (PD) in a sufficiently short scan duration that is similar to conventional MRF. This multi-shot approach allows considerable subsampling while traversing the entire k-space trajectory, can yield better SNR, reduced blurring, less distortion and can also be used to collect higher resolution data compared to existing single-shot EPI-MRF implementations. The generated parametric maps are compared to an accelerated spiral MRF implementation with the same acquisition parameters to evaluate the performance of this method. Additionally, an iterative reconstruction algorithm is applied to improve the accuracy of parametric map estimations and the fast convergence of EPI-MRF is also demonstrated.