Machine learning based priors for Bayesian inversion in MR imaging

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The Bayesian approach allows the incorporation of informative prior knowledge to effectively enable and improve the solution of inverse problems. Obtaining prior information in probabilistic terms is, however, a challenging task. Recently, machine learning has been applied for the training of generative models to facilitate the translation of historically or otherwise available data to a prior distribution. In this work, we apply this methodology to undersampled magnetic resonance imaging. In particular, we employ an autoencoder as part of a generative model to statistically regularise and solve the high-dimensional inverse problem using Bayesian inversion. Comparison with a classical Gaussian Markov random field prior is performed and numerical examples highlight the possible advantages of data-driven priors.