Rapid 2D phase-contrast magnetic resonance angiography reconstruction algorithm via compressed sensing

Abstract

Phase-contrast magnetic resonance angiography (PC MRA) is an excellent technique for visualization of venous vessels. However, the scan time of PC MRA is long compared with there of other MRA techniques. Recently, the potential of compressed sensing (CS) reconstruction to reduce the scan time in MR image acquisition using a sparse sampling dataset has become an active field of study. In this study, we propose a combination method to apply the CS reconstruction method to 2D PC MRA. This work was performed to enable faster 2D PC MRA imaging acquisition and to demonstrate its feasibility. We used a 0.32 T MR imaging (MRI) system and a total variation (TV)-based CS reconstruction algorithm. To validate the usefulness of our proposed reconstruction method, we used visual assessment for reconstructed images, and we measured the quantitative information for sampling rates from 12.5 to 75.0%. Based on our results, when the sampling ratio is increased, images reconstructed with the CS method have a similar level of image quality to fully sampled reconstruction images. The signal to noise ratio (SNR) and the contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) were also closer to the reference values when the sampling ratio was increased. We confirmed the feasibility of 2D PC MRA with the CS reconstruction method. Our results provide evidence that this method can improve the time resolution of 2D PC MRA.