INR meets Multi-Contrast MRI Reconstruction

Abstract: Multi-contrast MRI sequences allow for the acquisition of images with varying tissue contrast within a single scan. The resulting multi-contrast images can be used to extract quantitative information on tissue microstructure. To make such multi-contrast sequences feasible for clinical routine, the usually very long scan times need to be shortened e.g. through undersampling in k-space. However, this comes with challenges for the reconstruction. In general, advanced reconstruction techniques such as compressed sensing or deep learning-based approaches can enable the acquisition of high-quality images despite the acceleration. In this work, we leverage redundant anatomical information of multi-contrast sequences to achieve even higher acceleration rates. We use undersampling patterns that capture the contrast information located at the k-space center, while performing complementary undersampling across contrasts for high frequencies. To reconstruct this highly sparse k-space data, we propose an implicit neural representation (INR) network that is ideal for using the complementary information acquired across contrasts as it jointly reconstructs all contrast images. We demonstrate the benefits of our proposed INR method by applying it to multi-contrast MRI using the MPnRAGE sequence, where it outperforms the state-of-the-art parallel imaging compressed sensing (PICS) reconstruction method, even at higher acceleration factors.