Ultra-fast T2-weighted MR reconstruction using complementary T1-weighted information

Abstract

T1-weighted image (T1WI) and T2-weighted image (T2WI) are the two routinely acquired Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) protocols that provide complementary information for diagnosis. However, the total acquisition time of ~10 min yields the image quality vulnerable to artifacts such as motion. To speed up MRI process, various algorithms have been proposed to reconstruct high quality images from under-sampled k-space data. These algorithms only employ the information of an individual protocol (e.g., T2WI). In this paper, we propose to combine complementary MRI protocols (i.e., T1WI and under-sampled T2WI particularly) to reconstruct the high-quality image (i.e., fully-sampled T2WI). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to utilize data from different MRI protocols to speed up the reconstruction of a target sequence. Specifically, we present a novel deep learning approach, namely Dense-Unet, to accomplish the reconstruction task. The Dense-Unet requires fewer parameters and less computation, but achieves better performance. Our results have shown that Dense-Unet can reconstruct a 3D T2WI volume in less than 10 s, i.e., with the acceleration rate as high as 8 or more but with negligible aliasing artefacts and signal-noise-ratio (SNR) loss.