Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023) Main Conference Track
Alfredo De Goyeneche Macaya, Shreya Ramachandran, Ke Wang, Ekin Karasan, Joseph Y. Cheng, Stella X. Yu, Michael Lustig
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a powerful medical imaging modality that offers diagnostic information without harmful ionizing radiation. Unlike optical imaging, MRI sequentially samples the spatial Fourier domain (k-space) of the image. Measurements are collected in multiple shots, or readouts, and in each shot, data along a smooth trajectory is sampled.Conventional MRI data acquisition relies on sampling k-space row-by-row in short intervals, which is slow and inefficient. More efficient, non-Cartesian sampling trajectories (e.g., Spirals) use longer data readout intervals, but are more susceptible to magnetic field inhomogeneities, leading to off-resonance artifacts. Spiral trajectories cause off-resonance blurring in the image, and the mathematics of this blurring resembles that of optical blurring, where magnetic field variation corresponds to depth and readout duration to aperture size. Off-resonance blurring is a system issue with a physics-based, accurate forward model. We present a physics-informed deep learning framework for off-resonance correction in MRI, which is trained exclusively on synthetic, noise-like data with representative marginal statistics. Our approach allows for fat/water separation and is compatible with parallel imaging acceleration. Through end-to-end training using synthetic randomized data (i.e., noise-like images, coil sensitivities, field maps), we train the network to reverse off-resonance effects across diverse anatomies and contrasts without retraining. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through results on phantom and in-vivo data. This work has the potential to facilitate the clinical adoption of non-Cartesian sampling trajectories, enabling efficient, rapid, and motion-robust MRI scans. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/mikgroup/ResoNet.