UCLA

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a powerful diagnostic medical imaging technique that provides very high spatial resolution. By manipulating the signal evolution through careful imaging sequence design, MRI can generate a wide range of soft-tissue contrast unique to individual application. However, imaging speed remains an issue for many applications. In order to increase scan output without compromising the image quality, the data acquisition and image reconstruction methods need to be designed to fit each application to achieve maximum efficiency. This dissertation concerns several application-tailored accelerated imaging methods through improved sequence design, efficient k-space traverse, as well as tailored image reconstruction algorithm, all together aiming to exploit the full potential of data acquisition and image reconstruction in each application.

The first application is ferumoxtyol-enhanced 4D multi-phase cardiovascular MRI on pediatric patients with congenital heart disease. By taking advantage of the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) results from contrast enhancement, we introduced two methods to improve the scan efficiency with maintained clinical utility: one with reduced scan time and one with improved temporal resolution. The first method used prospective Poisson-disc under-sampling in combination with graphics processing unit accelerated parallel imaging and compressed sensing combined reconstruction algorithm to reduce scan time by approximately 50% while maintaining highly comparable image quality to un-accelerated acquisition in a clinically practical reconstruction time. The second method utilized a motion weighted reconstruction technique to increase temporal resolution of acquired data, and thus permits improved cardiac functional assessment. Compared with existing acceleration method, the proposed method has nearly three times lower computation burden and six times faster reconstruction speed, all with equal image quality.

The second application is noncontrast-enhanced 4D intracranial MR angiography with arterial spin labeling (ASL). Considering the inherently low SNR of ASL signal, we proposed to sample k-space with the efficient golden-angle stack-of-stars trajectory and reconstruct images using compressed sensing with magnitude subtraction as regularization. The acquisition and reconstruction strategy in combination produces images with detailed vascular structures and clean background. At the same time, it allows a reduced temporal blurring delineation of the fine distal arteries when compared with the conventional k-space weighted image contrast (KWIC) reconstruction. Stands upon on this, we further developed an improved stack-of-stars radial sampling strategy for reducing streaking artifacts in general volumetric MRI. By rotating the radial spokes in a golden angle manner along the partition-encoding direction, the aliasing pattern due to under-sampling is modified, resulting in improved image quality for gridding and more advanced reconstruction methods.

The third application is low-latency real-time imaging. To achieve sufficient frame rate, real-time MRI typically requires significant k-space under-sampling to accelerate the data acquisition. At the same time, many real-time application, such as interventional MRI, requires user interaction or decision making based on image feedback. Therefore, low-latency on-the-fly reconstruction is highly desirable. We proposed a parallel imaging and convolutional neural network combined image reconstruction framework for low-latency and high quality reconstruction. This is achieved by compacting gradient descent steps resolved from conventional parallel imaging reconstruction as network layers and interleaved with convolutional layers in a general convolutional neural network. Once all parameters of the network are determined during the off-line training process, it can be applied to unseen data with less than 100ms reconstruction time per frame, while more than 1s is usually needed for conventional parallel imaging and compressed sensing combined reconstruction.