Fast Multiclass Dictionaries Learning With Geometrical Directions in MRI Reconstruction.

OBJECTIVE: Improve the reconstructed image with fast and multiclass dictionaries learning when magnetic resonance imaging is accelerated by undersampling the k-space data. METHODS: A fast orthogonal dictionary learning method is introduced into magnetic resonance image reconstruction to provide adaptive sparse representation of images. To enhance the sparsity, image is divided into classified patches according to the same geometrical direction and dictionary is trained within each class. A new sparse reconstruction model with the multiclass dictionaries is proposed and solved using a fast alternating direction method of multipliers. RESULTS: Experiments on phantom and brain imaging data with acceleration factor up to 10 and various undersampling patterns are conducted. The proposed method is compared with state-of-the-art magnetic resonance image reconstruction methods. CONCLUSION: Artifacts are better suppressed and image edges are better preserved than the compared methods. Besides, the computation of the proposed approach is much faster than the typical K-SVD dictionary learning method in magnetic resonance image reconstruction. SIGNIFICANCE: The proposed method can be exploited in undersampled magnetic resonance imaging to reduce data acquisition time and reconstruct images with better image quality.

Image reconstruction of compressed sensing MRI using graph-based redundant wavelet transform.

Compressed sensing magnetic resonance imaging has shown great capacity for accelerating magnetic resonance imaging if an image can be sparsely represented. How the image is sparsified seriously affects its reconstruction quality. In the present study, a graph-based redundant wavelet transform is introduced to sparsely represent magnetic resonance images in iterative image reconstructions. With this transform, image patches is viewed as vertices and their differences as edges, and the shortest path on the graph minimizes the total difference of all image patches. Using the l1 norm regularized formulation of the problem solved by an alternating-direction minimization with continuation algorithm, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art reconstruction methods in removing artifacts and achieves fewer reconstruction errors on the tested datasets.

Balanced sparse model for tight frames in compressed sensing magnetic resonance imaging.

Compressed sensing has shown to be promising to accelerate magnetic resonance imaging. In this new technology, magnetic resonance images are usually reconstructed by enforcing its sparsity in sparse image reconstruction models, including both synthesis and analysis models. The synthesis model assumes that an image is a sparse combination of atom signals while the analysis model assumes that an image is sparse after the application of an analysis operator. Balanced model is a new sparse model that bridges analysis and synthesis models by introducing a penalty term on the distance of frame coefficients to the range of the analysis operator. In this paper, we study the performance of the balanced model in tight frame based compressed sensing magnetic resonance imaging and propose a new efficient numerical algorithm to solve the optimization problem. By tuning the balancing parameter, the new model achieves solutions of three models. It is found that the balanced model has a comparable performance with the analysis model. Besides, both of them achieve better results than the synthesis model no matter what value the balancing parameter is. Experiment shows that our proposed numerical algorithm constrained split augmented Lagrangian shrinkage algorithm for balanced model (C-SALSA-B) converges faster than previously proposed algorithms accelerated proximal algorithm (APG) and alternating directional method of multipliers for balanced model (ADMM-B).

Parallel computing of patch-based nonlocal operator and its application in compressed sensing MRI.

Magnetic resonance imaging has been benefited from compressed sensing in improving imaging speed. But the computation time of compressed sensing magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI) is relatively long due to its iterative reconstruction process. Recently, a patch-based nonlocal operator (PANO) has been applied in CS-MRI to significantly reduce the reconstruction error by making use of self-similarity in images. But the two major steps in PANO, learning similarities and performing 3D wavelet transform, require extensive computations. In this paper, a parallel architecture based on multicore processors is proposed to accelerate computations of PANO. Simulation results demonstrate that the acceleration factor approaches the number of CPU cores and overall PANO-based CS-MRI reconstruction can be accomplished in several seconds.