Compressed sensing reconstruction of cardiac cine MRI using golden angle spiral trajectories

Abstract

In dynamic cardiac cine Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), the spatiotemporal resolution is limited by the low imaging speed. Compressed sensing (CS) theory has been applied to improve the imaging speed and thus the spatiotemporal resolution. The purpose of this paper is to improve CS reconstruction of under sampled data by exploiting spatiotemporal sparsity and efficient spiral trajectories.We extend k–t sparse algorithm to spiral trajectories to achieve high spatio temporal resolutions in cardiac cine imaging. We have exploited spatiotemporal sparsity of cardiac cine MRI by applying a 2D+time wavelet-Fourier transform. For efficient coverage of k-space, we have used a modified version of multi shot (interleaved) spirals trajectories. In order to reduce incoherent aliasing artifact, we use different random undersampling pattern for each temporal frame. Finally, we have used nonuniform fast Fourier transform (NUFFT) algorithm to reconstruct the image from the non-uniformly acquired samples.The proposed approach was tested in simulated and cardiac cine MRI data. Results show that higher acceleration factors with improved image quality can be obtained with the proposed approach in comparison to the existing state-of-the-art method.The flexibility of the introduced method should allow it to be used not only for the challenging case of cardiac imaging, but also for other patient motion where the patient moves or breathes during acquisition.