As an advanced medical imaging technology, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has great advantages and application potentials in medical clinical diagnosis. However, since the long scanning time and the artifacts caused by patient movements, the imaging results are always not satisfactory. Therefore, accelerating MRI and improving the imaging quality are the key problems. In this work, we propose a novel deep network that combines the U-net architecture with non-local attention blocks for MRI reconstruction. We employ the U-net to construct the basic network. The non-local attention is exploited to capture the remote dependencies in MRI images which calculates the weighted average of the remaining multiple location features as the value of the response location. The U-net has limitations in capturing long-term dependencies, however, the non-local attention can solve this problem well. Furthermore, we develop the residual module to better retain the detail information. The proposed model is compared with some recent leading MRI reconstruction methods, including the state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods. Compared with these methods, the proposed residual non-local attention network provides superior MRI reconstruction results and retains better perceptual image details.
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