Accelerated cardiac cine MRI using spatiotemporal correlation-based hybrid plug-and-play priors (SEABUS)

Abstract

Objective. The plug-and-play prior (P3) can be flexibly coupled with multiple iterative optimizations, which has been successfully applied to the inverse problems of medical imaging. In this work, for accelerated cardiac cine magnetic resonance imaging (CC-MRI), the Spatiotemporal corrElAtion-based hyBrid plUg-and-play priorS (SEABUS) integrating a local P3 and a nonlocal P3 are introduced. Approach. Specifically, the local P3 enforces pixelwise edge-orientation consistency by conducting reference frame guided multiscale orientation projection on a subset containing a few adjacent frames; the nonlocal P3 constrains the cubewise anatomic-structure similarity by performing cube matching and 4D filtering (CM4D) on all frames. By using effectively a composite splitting algorithm (CSA), SEABUS is incorporated into a fast iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm and a new accelerated CC-MRI approach named SEABUS-FCSA is proposed. Main results. The experiment and algorithm analysis demonstrate the efficiency and potential of the proposed SEABUS-FCSA approach, which has the best performance in terms of reducing aliasing artifacts and capturing dynamic features in comparison with several state-of-the-art accelerated CC-MRI technologies. Significance. Our approach aims to propose a new hybrid P3 based iterative algorithm, which is not only used to improve the quality of accelerated cardiac cine imaging but also extend the FCSA methodology.