Kinam Kwon1, Dongchan Kim1, Hyunseok Seo1, Jaejin Cho1, Byungjai Kim1, and HyunWook Park1
1KAIST, Daejeon, Korea, Republic of
Synopsis
A long imaging time has been regarded as a major drawback
of MRI, and many techniques have been proposed to overcome this problem.
Parallel imaging (PI) and compressed sensing (CS) techniques utilize different
sensitivity of multi-channel RF coils and sparsity of signal in a certain
domain to remove aliasing artifacts that are generated by subsampling,
respectively. In this study, an artificial neural networks (ANN) are applied to
MR reconstruction to reduce imaging time, and it is shown that the ANN model
has a potential to be comparable to PI and CS.Introduction
A long imaging
time has been regarded as a major drawback of MRI, and many techniques have
been proposed to overcome this problem. Parallel imaging (PI) and compressed
sensing (CS) techniques utilize different sensitivity of multi-channel RF coils
and sparsity of signal in a certain domain to remove aliasing artifacts that are
generated by subsampling, respectively. In addition, PI and CS have been
combined to accelerate the imaging time.
[1] Meanwhile, artificial
neural networks (ANN) have been applied to various fields, which has shown
superior performance by utilizing deep architecture and tremendous database. In
this study, an ANN model is applied to MR reconstruction to reduce imaging
time, and it is shown that the ANN model has a potential to be comparable to PI
and CS.
Materials
and Methods
Three typical
brain imaging sequences such as T1-weighted (T1w), T2-weighted (T2w) and fluid
attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) are commonly used. For the three imaging sequences,
brain MR images from 12 subjects were obtained using Siemens Magnetom Verio 3T
system. Three sequences were fully sampled with 216 phase encoding lines and
384 readout points, from which the experimental data were retrospectively
subsampled to make database. Fig 1 shows schematic diagram of the proposed
method. Learning and reconstruction are processed line by line because the aliasing
artifacts from subsampling spread in phase encoding direction. The aliased image
was divided into real and imaginary parts, and used as inputs of the ANN model.
Sensitivity maps were estimated from 16 center lines by using ESPIRiT
algorithm.
[2] Likewise, the sensitivity maps are divided into real and
imaginary parts and used as inputs of the model. Desired outputs were computed
as follows: \[I_{d} (x,y)=|\sum_{c=1}^NS_{c}^*(x,y)I_{c}(x,y)|\] ,
where I
d, I
c, and S
c are the
desired combined image, the obtained image from channel c, and the sensitivity map
of channel c, respectively. In this study, four channels were used to
reconstruct the images. Two models were learned according to two subsampling
patterns that have the same acceleration factor (R=2.6024). The proposed method
was implemented using the well-known Caffe package.
[3] The ANN model was (216×16)-(864)-(864)-(864)-(216×1), where input matrix with 216×16 consists of real and imaginary lines of
the aliased images and sensitivity maps for 4 channels, output matrix with 216×1 consists of aforementioned combined line,
and three hidden layers have 864 nodes. Nodes between neighboring layers were
fully connected, and rectified linear unit was used as an activation function. Total
648 image slices with 216×384 were used for learning the model, and aliased
images that were not used for learning were used for test of the model to show
the performance of the learned model. Various hyper parameters like learning
rate, the number of iterations, and weight initialization were heuristically selected.
Results
As shown in Figs.
2 and 3, reconstructed T2w images from the proposed method and SPIRiT
[1] are displayed when the regular subsampling pattern of Fig 2c and the irregular subsampling
pattern of Fig 3c are used, respectively. In Fig 2d-e, visible errors from the
proposed method are mainly in edges, but
those of SPIRiT are distributed in center region that have small difference
between coil sensitivity maps. Both methods can remove aliasing
artifacts, but the reconstructed image from the proposed method looks more
blurry whereas that from SPIRiT looks noisy. In Fig 3b, the reconstructed image
from SPIRiT becomes worse when the irregular subsampling pattern is used, even
though the number of sampling lines is same as Fig 2b. However, the proposed
method can remove aliasing artifacts and suppress noise well in Fig 3a.
Discussion
and Conclusion
The proposed
method utilizes the ANN model. The database for learning the model has profound
information that can be used to remove aliasing artifacts and noise of the subsampled
images. The ANN method utilizes coil sensitivity
maps and subsampled data as input data, and learns relation between subsampled
and full-sampled data as prior information. Learning-based method depends on database, and it is
difficult to collect many datasets sufficiently. In this study, although
relatively small datasets are used, the proposed method can reconstruct the
subsampled images well. The proposed method needs only a feedforward operation
of ANN, which requires very short reconstruction time. The proposed method can
reconstruct an image from irregularly subsampled k-space data, which could be useful
in dynamic imaging that is differently sampled according to motion phases. For
further works, more database would be used to improve the performance, and to
correct MR artifacts like EPI ghost artifact.
Acknowledgements
This
research was partly supported by the Brain Research Program through the
National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science,
ICT & Future Planning (2014M3C7033999) and Korea Health Technology R&D
Project through the Korea Health Industry Development Institute (KHIDI), funded
by the Ministry of Health & Welfare, Republic of Korea (grant number :
HI14C1135).References
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