Accelerating Low-field MRI: Compressed Sensing and AI for fast noise-robust imaging

Abstract: Portable, low-field Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners are increasingly being deployed in clinical settings. However, critical barriers to their widespread use include low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), generally low image quality, and long scan duration. As these systems can operate in unusual environments, the level and spectral characteristics of the environmental electromagnetic inference (EMI) noise can change substantially across sites and scans, further reducing image quality. Methods for accelerating acquisition and boosting image quality are of critical importance to enable clinically actionable high-quality imaging in these systems. Despite the role that compressed sensing (CS) and AI-based methods have had in improving image quality for high-field MRI, their adoption for low-field imaging is in its infancy, and it is unclear how robust these methods are in low SNR regimes. Here, we investigate and compare leading CS and AI-based methods for image reconstruction from subsampled data and perform a thorough analysis of their performance across a range of SNR values. We compare classical L1-wavelet CS with leading data-driven and model-driven AI methods. Experiments are performed using publicly available datasets and our own low-field and high-field experimental data. Specifically, we apply an unrolled AI network to low-field MRI, and find it outperforms competing reconstruction methods. We prospectively deploy our undersampling methods to accelerate imaging on a 6.5 mT MRI scanner. This work highlights the potential and pitfalls of advanced reconstruction techniques in low-field MRI, paving the way for broader clinical applications.