Reference-Driven Compressed Sensing MR Image Reconstruction Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks without Pre-Training.

Abstract

Deep learning has proven itself to be able to reduce the scanning time of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and to improve the image reconstruction quality since it was introduced into Compressed Sensing MRI (CS-MRI). However, the requirement of using large, high-quality, and patient-based datasets for network training procedures is always a challenge in clinical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning based compressed sensing MR image reconstruction method that does not require any pre-training procedure or training dataset, thereby largely reducing clinician dependence on patient-based datasets. The proposed method is based on the Deep Image Prior (DIP) framework and uses a high-resolution reference MR image as the input of the convolutional neural network in order to induce the structural prior in the learning procedure. This reference-driven strategy improves the efficiency and effect of network learning. We then add the k-space data correction step to enforce the consistency of the k-space data with the measurements, which further improve the image reconstruction accuracy. Experiments on in vivo MR datasets showed that the proposed method can achieve more accurate reconstruction results from undersampled k-space data.