Diagnostic quality assessment of IR-prepared 3D magnetic resonance neuroimaging accelerated using compressed sensing and k-space sampling order optimization

Purpose: To evaluate the clinical diagnostic efficacy of accelerated 3D magnetic resonance (MR) neuroimaging by radiological assessment for image quality and artefacts. Study type: Prospective healthy volunteer study. Subjects: Eight healthy subjects. Field strength/sequence: Inversion Recovery (IR) prepared 3D Gradient Echo (GRE) sequence on a 1.5 T GE Signa HDx scanner. Assessment: Independent radiological diagnostic quality assessments of accelerated 3D MR brain datasets were carried out by four experienced neuro-radiologists who were blinded to the acceleration factor and to the subject. The radiological grading was based on a previously reported radiological scoring key that was used for image quality assessment of human brains. Statistical tests: Bland-Altman analysis. Results: Optimization of the k-space sampling order was important for preserving contrast in accelerated scans. Despite having lower scores than fully sampled datasets, the majority of the compressed sensing (CS) accelerated brain datasets with k-space sampling order optimization (19/24 datasets by Radiologist 1, 24/24 datasets by Radiologist 2 and 16/24 datasets by Radiologist 3) were graded to be fully diagnostic indicating that there was adequate confidence for performing gross structural assessment of the brain. Conclusion: Optimization of k-space acquisition order improves the clinical utility of CS accelerated 3D neuroimaging. This method may be appropriate for routine radiological assessment of the brain.