Three-Dimensional Diffusion-Weighted Multi-Slab MRI With Slice Profile Compensation Using Deep Energy Model
This addresses a specific bottleneck in high-resolution diffusion MRI for clinical and research applications, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackled slab boundary artifacts in 3D multi-slab diffusion-weighted MRI, which cause intensity fluctuations and aliasing, by proposing a regularized slab profile encoding method with multi-scale energy regularization, resulting in significantly improved image quality compared to non-regularized and TV-regularized approaches.
Three-dimensional (3D) multi-slab acquisition is a technique frequently employed in high-resolution diffusion-weighted MRI in order to achieve the best signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) efficiency. However, this technique is limited by slab boundary artifacts that cause intensity fluctuations and aliasing between slabs which reduces the accuracy of anatomical imaging. Addressing this issue is crucial for advancing diffusion MRI quality and making high-resolution imaging more feasible for clinical and research applications. In this work, we propose a regularized slab profile encoding (PEN) method within a Plug-and-Play ADMM framework, incorporating multi-scale energy (MuSE) regularization to effectively improve the slab combined reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves image quality compared to non-regularized and TV-regularized PEN approaches. The regularized PEN framework provides a more robust and efficient solution for high-resolution 3D diffusion MRI, potentially enabling clearer, more reliable anatomical imaging across various applications.