Volumetric Reconstruction Resolves Off-Resonance Artifacts in Static and Dynamic PROPELLER MRI
This addresses image quality issues in MRI for medical diagnostics, offering a novel solution for a specific acquisition type without incremental improvements.
The paper tackles off-resonance artifacts in MRI, such as blurring and ghosting, by proposing a 3D volumetric reconstruction method that models an additional spectral dimension, enabling correction of chemical shift in PROPELLER MRI without extra measurements and achieving reconstruction in minutes on a single GPU.
Off-resonance artifacts in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are visual distortions that occur when the actual resonant frequencies of spins within the imaging volume differ from the expected frequencies used to encode spatial information. These discrepancies can be caused by a variety of factors, including magnetic field inhomogeneities, chemical shifts, or susceptibility differences within the tissues. Such artifacts can manifest as blurring, ghosting, or misregistration of the reconstructed image, and they often compromise its diagnostic quality. We propose to resolve these artifacts by lifting the 2D MRI reconstruction problem to 3D, introducing an additional "spectral" dimension to model this off-resonance. Our approach is inspired by recent progress in modeling radiance fields, and is capable of reconstructing both static and dynamic MR images as well as separating fat and water, which is of independent clinical interest. We demonstrate our approach in the context of PROPELLER (Periodically Rotated Overlapping ParallEL Lines with Enhanced Reconstruction) MRI acquisitions, which are popular for their robustness to motion artifacts. Our method operates in a few minutes on a single GPU, and to our knowledge is the first to correct for chemical shift in gradient echo PROPELLER MRI reconstruction without additional measurements or pretraining data.