Fast multi-contrast MRI reconstruction

Multi-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a useful technique to aid clinical diagnosis. This paper proposes an efficient algorithm to jointly reconstruct multiple T1/T2-weighted images of the same anatomical cross section from partially sampled k-space data. The joint reconstruction problem is formulated as minimizing a linear combination of three terms, corresponding to a least squares data fitting, joint total variation (TV) and group wavelet-sparsity regularization. It is rooted in two observations: 1) the variance of image gradients should be similar for the same spatial position across multiple contrasts; 2) the wavelet coefficients of all images from the same anatomical cross section should have similar sparse modes. To efficiently solve this problem, we decompose it into joint TV regularization and group sparsity subproblems, respectively. Finally, the reconstructed image is obtained from the weighted average of solutions from the two subproblems, in an iterative framework. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method compared to existing multi-contrast MRI methods. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.