Parallel non-Cartesian spatial-temporal dictionary learning neural networks (stDLNN) for accelerating 4D-MRI

Abstract

Dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) acquisitions are relatively slow due to physical and physiological limitations. The spatial-temporal dictionary learning (DL) approach accelerates dynamic MRI by learning spatial-temporal correlations, but the regularization parameters need to be manually adjusted, the performance at high acceleration rate is limited, and the reconstruction can be time-consuming. Deep learning techniques have shown good performance in accelerating MRI due to the powerful representational capabilities of neural networks. In this work, we propose a parallel non-Cartesian spatial-temporal dictionary learning neural networks (stDLNN) framework that combines dictionary learning with deep learning algorithms and utilizes the spatial-temporal prior information of dynamic MRI data to achieve better reconstruction quality and efficiency. The coefficient estimation modules (CEM) are designed in the framework to adaptively adjust the regularization coefficients. Experimental results show that combining dictionary learning with deep neural networks and using spatial-temporal dictionaries can obviously improve the image quality and computational efficiency compared with the state-of-the-art non-Cartesian imaging methods for accelerating the 4D-MRI especially at high acceleration rate.

Keywords: Deep learning; Dictionary learning; Dynamic magnetic resonance imaging; Non-cartesian sampling.