DARCS: Memory-Efficient Deep Compressed Sensing Reconstruction for Acceleration of 3D Whole-Heart Coronary MR Angiography

Three-dimensional coronary magnetic resonance angiography (CMRA) demands reconstruction algorithms that can significantly suppress the artifacts from a heavily undersampled acquisition. While unrolling-based deep reconstruction methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance on 2D image reconstruction, their application to 3D reconstruction is hindered by the large amount of memory needed to train an unrolled network. In this study, we propose a memory-efficient deep compressed sensing method by employing a sparsifying transform based on a pre-trained artifact estimation network. The motivation is that the artifact image estimated by a well-trained network is sparse when the input image is artifact-free, and less sparse when the input image is artifact-affected. Thus, the artifact-estimation network can be used as an inherent sparsifying transform. The proposed method, named De-Aliasing Regularization based Compressed Sensing (DARCS), was compared with a traditional compressed sensing method, de-aliasing generative adversarial network (DAGAN), model-based deep learning (MoDL), and plug-and-play for accelerations of 3D CMRA. The results demonstrate that the proposed method improved the reconstruction quality relative to the compared methods by a large margin. Furthermore, the proposed method well generalized for different undersampling rates and noise levels. The memory usage of the proposed method was only 63% of that needed by MoDL. In conclusion, the proposed method achieves improved reconstruction quality for 3D CMRA with reduced memory burden.