An optimized 3D UTE sequence combined with the proposed reconstruction methods can provide high-resolution motion robust pulmonary MRI. Feasibility was shown in patients who had irregular breathing patterns in which our approach could depict clinically relevant pulmonary pathologies. Magn Reson Med 79:2954-2967, 2018. © 2017 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.

Purpose: To develop a general phase regularized image reconstruction method, with applications to partial Fourier imaging, water-fat imaging and flow imaging. Theory and Methods:The problem of enforcing phase constraints in reconstruction was studied under a regularized inverse problem framework. A general phase regularized reconstruction algorithm was proposed to enable various joint reconstruction of partial Fourier imaging, water-fat imaging and flow imaging, along with parallel imaging (PI) and compressed sensing (CS). Since phase regularized reconstruction is inherently non-convex and sensitive to phase wraps in the initial solution, a reconstruction technique, named phase cycling, was proposed to render the overall algorithm invariant to phase wraps. The proposed method was applied to retrospectively under-sampled in vivo datasets and compared with state of the art reconstruction methods.Results: Phase cycling reconstructions showed reduction of artifacts compared to reconstructions without phase cycling and achieved similar performances as state of the art results in partial Fourier, water-fat and divergence-free regularized flow reconstruction. Joint reconstruction of partial Fourier + water-fat imaging + PI + CS, and partial Fourier + divergence-free regularized flow imaging + PI + CS were demonstrated. Conclusion:The proposed phase cycling reconstruction provides an alternative way to perform phase regularized reconstruction, without the need to perform phase unwrapping. It is robust to the choice of initial solutions and encourages the joint reconstruction of phase imaging applications.2

Purpose To investigate four-dimensional flow denoising using the divergence-free wavelet (DFW) transform and compare its performance with existing techniques. Theory and Methods DFW is a vector-wavelet that provides a sparse representation of flow in a generally divergence-free field and can be used to enforce “soft” divergence-free conditions when discretization and partial voluming result in numerical nondivergence-free components. Efficient denoising is achieved by appropriate shrinkage of divergence-free wavelet and nondivergence-free coefficients. SureShrink and cycle spinning are investigated to further improve denoising performance. Results DFW denoising was compared with existing methods on simulated and phantom data and was shown to yield better noise reduction overall while being robust to segmentation errors. The processing was applied to in vivo data and was demonstrated to improve visualization while preserving quantifications of flow data. Conclusion DFW denoising of four-dimensional flow data was shown to reduce noise levels in flow data both quantitatively and visually.

Purpose: To develop a framework to reconstruct large-scale volumetric dynamic MRI from rapid continuous and non-gated acquisitions, with applications to pulmonary and dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) imaging.Theory and Methods: The problem considered here is a reconstruction of hundred-gigabytes of dynamic volumetric image data from a few gigabytes of k-space data, acquired continuously over several minutes. This is a vastly under-determined optimization, with problem sizes heavily stressing compute resources as well as memory management and storage. To overcome these challenges, we leverage intrinsic three dimensional (3D) trajectories, such as 3D radial and 3D cones, with ordering that incoherently cover time and k-space over the entire acquisition. We then propose two innovations: (1) A compressed representation using multi-scale low rank matrix factorization that both constrains the reconstruction problem and reduces its memory footprint.(2) Stochastic optimization to reduce computation, improve memory locality and minimize communications between threads and processors. We demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method on DCE imaging acquired with a golden-angle ordered 3D cones trajectory and pulmonary imaging acquired with a bitreversed ordered 3D radial trajectory. We compare it with "soft-gated" dynamic reconstruction for DCE and respiratory resolved reconstruction for pulmonary imaging.Results: The proposed technique shows transient dynamics that are not seen in gating based methods.When applied to datasets with irregular, or non-repetitive motions, the proposed method also displays sharper image features. Conclusion:We demonstrated a method that can reconstruct massive 3D dynamic image series in the extreme undersampling and extreme computation setting.