Section: New Results

Calibration-less parallel imaging compressed sensing reconstruction based on OSCAR regularization

Participants: Emilie Chouzenoux, Loubna El Gueddari (Collaboration: Philippe Ciuciu, Alexandre Vignaut, Inria Saclay, Parietal)

Over the last decade, the combination of parallel imaging (PI) and compressed sensing (CS) in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has allowed to speed up acquisition while maintaining a good signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for millimetric resolution. Self-calibrating techniques such as L1-ESPiRIT have emerged as a standard approach to estimate the coil sensitivity maps that are required at the reconstruction stage. Although straightforward in Cartesian acquisitions, these approaches become more computationally demanding in non-Cartesian scenarios especially for high resolution imaging (e.g. 500 $\mu$m in plane). Instead, calibration-less techniques no longer require this prior knowledge to perform multi-channel image reconstruction from undersampled k-space data. In this work, we introduce a new calibration-less PI-CS reconstruction method that is particularly suited to non-Cartesian data. It leverages structure sparsity of the multi-channel images in a wavelet transform domain while adapting to SNR inhomogeneities across receivers thanks to the OSCAR-norm regularization. Comparison and validation on 8 to 20-fold prospectively accelerated high-resolution ex-vivo human brain MRI data collected at 7 Tesla shows that the subbandwise OSCAR-norm regularization achieves the best trade-off between image quality and computational cost at the reconstructions stage compared to other tested versions (global, scalewise and pixelwise). This approach provides slight to moderate improvement over its state-of-the-art competitors (self-calibrating `1-ESPIRiT method and calibration-less AC-LORAKS and CaLM methods) in terms of closeness to the Cartesian reference magnitude image. Importantly, it also preserves much better phase information compared to other approaches [37], [57], [62].