A 1D Plug-and-Play Synthetic Data Deep Learning For Undersampled Magnetic Resonance Image Reconstruction

Abstract

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Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays a pivotal role in modern medical diagnosis yet is often hindered by the long imaging time. MRI imaging can be accelerated through undersampling, but the introduced aliasing artifacts should be removed during image reconstruction. While deep learning reconstruction methods excel at image de-aliasing, they may yield suboptimal results when training sampling settings differ from those at the time of reconstruction. To decouple from specific sampling settings, we propose using synthetic data to generate a substantial training dataset and pre-train a 1D deep denoiser. We then integrate the trained deep denoiser into the iterative reconstruction process as a replacement for the approximation operator within the deep plug-and-play framework. In vivo results indicate that the proposed method exhibits robust and visually appealing image reconstruction when there is a mismatch between the training and reconstruction undersampling settings, such as different undersampling patterns and sampling rates.