Reconstructing high-resolution cardiac MR movies from under-sampled frames

Abstract

In medicine, high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging can aid accurate diagnosis. However, high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging usually necessitates a longer acquisition time than low-resolution imaging, since the resolution of magnetic resonance images is determined by the extent of k-space that is sampled. Long scan times can induce motion artifacts in the images and lead to patient discomfort, and therefore, scan times should be kept as low as possible. Although a short acquisition time comes at the expense of spatial resolution, the resolution of magnetic resonance images can be increased using post-processing methods. In this work, we present one such method designed for cardiac magnetic resonance movies. Our method uses deformable image registration to capture the motion of the heart, and an additional term to account for changes in pixel intensity. We demonstrate that our method has the potential to reconstruct high-resolution cardiac magnetic resonance movies from highly under-sampled data, using only a single high-resolution reference frame.