Abstract

Info

Title:: Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging based on image block matching constraints

Author(s):: XU Zhongbiao; DENG Guanhua; HUANG Wei; Department of Radiation Oncology, Guangdong Provincial Peoples Hospital (Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences), Southern Medical University, Guangzhou 510080, China

Keywords:: Keywords: diffusion-weighted imaging image reconstruction block matching image constraint

Abstract:: Abstract: Objective To improve the image reconstruction quality of diffusion-weighted imaging with high acceleration factor for accelerating the acquisition. Methods Image block matching method was used to extract similar image blocks in diffusion-weighted images for low-rank constraint and sparseness constraint, and it was integrated into the traditional sensitivity encoding (SENSE) parallel reconstruction algorithm to improve image reconstruction quality and reduce image noise. Two sets of human data were collected in the experiments. The reconstructed results using traditional SENSE reconstruction, total variation constraint-based SENSE (SENSE-TV) reconstruction and the proposed method were compared at 3× and 4× accelerations. The errors of the diffusion images and fractional anisotropy (FA) maps with the reference images from fully sampled data were quantitatively calculated. Results Compared with traditional SENSE and SENSE-TV methods, the proposed method resulted in the reconstructed diffusion images with higher image quality and lower image errors in the 3× and 4× acceleration experiments. The quantitative analysis showed that the FA calculated by the proposed method was more accurate and had lower errors. Conclusion By constraining low-rank and sparseness of similar image blocks from images in reconstruction, it is expected to achieve high image quality under high acceleration factor.