Real-time dynamic vocal tract imaging using an accelerated spiral GRE sequence and low rank plus sparse reconstruction

Abstract

Purpose: To develop a real-time dynamic vocal tract imaging method using an accelerated spiral GRE sequence and low rank plus sparse reconstruction.

Methods: Spiral k-space sampling has high data acquisition efficiency and thus is suited for real-time dynamic imaging; further acceleration can be achieved by undersampling k-space and using a model-based reconstruction. Low rank plus sparse reconstruction is a promising method with fast computation and increased robustness to global signal changes and bulk motion, as the images are decomposed into low rank and sparse terms representing different dynamic components. However, the combination with spiral scanning has not been well studied. In this study an accelerated spiral GRE sequence was developed with an optimized low rank plus sparse reconstruction and compared with L1-SPIRiT and XD-GRASP methods. The off-resonance was also corrected using a Chebyshev approximation method to reduce blurring on a frame-by-frame basis.

Results: The low rank plus sparse reconstruction method is sensitive to the weights of the low rank and sparse terms. The optimized reconstruction showed advantages over other methods with reduced aliasing and improved SNR. With the proposed method, spatial resolution of 1.3*1.3 mm² with 150 mm field-of-view (FOV) and temporal resolution of 30 frames-per-second (fps) was achieved with good image quality. Blurring was reduced using the Chebyshev approximation method.

Conclusion: This work studies low rank plus sparse reconstruction using the spiral trajectory and demonstrates a new method for dynamic vocal tract imaging which can benefit studies of speech disorders.

Keywords: Low rank plus sparse; Off-resonance correction; Real-time vocal tract imaging; Spiral.