Marcus T. Alley

Michael J. Anderson, Jonathan I. Tamir, Javier S. Turek et al.

Magnetic resonance imaging is capable of producing volumetric images without ionizing radiation. Nonetheless, long acquisitions lead to prohibitively long exams. Compressed sensing (CS) can enable faster scanning via sub-sampling with reduced artifacts. However, CS requires significantly higher reconstruction computation, limiting current clinical applications to 2D/3D or limited-resolution dynamic imaging. Here we analyze the practical limitations to T2 Shuffling, a four-dimensional CS-based acquisition, which provides sharp 3D-isotropic-resolution and multi-contrast images in a single scan. Our improvements to the pipeline on a single machine provide a 3x overall reconstruction speedup, which allowed us to add algorithmic changes improving image quality. Using four machines, we achieved additional 2.1x improvement through distributed parallelization. Our solution reduced the reconstruction time in the hospital to 90 seconds on a 4-node cluster, enabling its use clinically. To understand the implications of scaling this application, we simulated running our reconstructions with a multiple scanner setup typical in hospitals.

Joseph Y. Cheng, Feiyu Chen, Marcus T. Alley et al.

To increase the flexibility and scalability of deep neural networks for image reconstruction, a framework is proposed based on bandpass filtering. For many applications, sensing measurements are performed indirectly. For example, in magnetic resonance imaging, data are sampled in the frequency domain. The introduction of bandpass filtering enables leveraging known imaging physics while ensuring that the final reconstruction is consistent with actual measurements to maintain reconstruction accuracy. We demonstrate this flexible architecture for reconstructing subsampled datasets of MRI scans. The resulting high subsampling rates increase the speed of MRI acquisitions and enable the visualization rapid hemodynamics.

Morteza Mardani, Enhao Gong, Joseph Y. Cheng et al.

Magnetic resonance image (MRI) reconstruction is a severely ill-posed linear inverse task demanding time and resource intensive computations that can substantially trade off {\it accuracy} for {\it speed} in real-time imaging. In addition, state-of-the-art compressed sensing (CS) analytics are not cognizant of the image {\it diagnostic quality}. To cope with these challenges we put forth a novel CS framework that permeates benefits from generative adversarial networks (GAN) to train a (low-dimensional) manifold of diagnostic-quality MR images from historical patients. Leveraging a mixture of least-squares (LS) GANs and pixel-wise $\ell_1$ cost, a deep residual network with skip connections is trained as the generator that learns to remove the {\it aliasing} artifacts by projecting onto the manifold. LSGAN learns the texture details, while $\ell_1$ controls the high-frequency noise. A multilayer convolutional neural network is then jointly trained based on diagnostic quality images to discriminate the projection quality. The test phase performs feed-forward propagation over the generator network that demands a very low computational overhead. Extensive evaluations are performed on a large contrast-enhanced MR dataset of pediatric patients. In particular, images rated based on expert radiologists corroborate that GANCS retrieves high contrast images with detailed texture relative to conventional CS, and pixel-wise schemes. In addition, it offers reconstruction under a few milliseconds, two orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art CS-MRI schemes.