Plug-and-play infimal convolution for dynamic MRI

By Amin Sabir
Supervisors: Yury Korolev, Matthias Ehrhardt

Aim: reconstruct dynamic MRI videos from accelerated undersampled measurements \(\mathbf{y}=\mathbf{Ax}\) where \(\mathbf{A}\) is an undersampled Fourier operator.

Applications: real-time cardiac imaging, free-breathing motion

Our method: we proposed a proximal gradient descent (PGD) method based on Plug-and-play (PnP) regularisation with infimial convolution (IC). We call it PnP-IC-PGD.

Contents:

  1. Setup and sampling masks - (Poster figure 1)
  2. Classical infimal convolution example Low-rank + Sparsity (L+S) - (Poster figure 2)
  3. Comparison with unrolled and Deep equilibrium trained denoiser methods (Pnp-IC-PGD) - (Poster figure 3)

Dynamic MRI inverse Problem setup

Selection of Gaussian sampling masks to choose from 1x - fully sampled, 2x (50% sampled), 4x (25% sampled), 8x (12.5% sampled). Note black indicates the samples, white corresponds to the missed readings across the scan.

We use the Gaussian mask with acceleration factor 8x on a real-world cardiac 2D+t dataset from the 2023 CMRxRecon challenge. This dataset has fully-sampled cine measurements which we use as the ground truth for evaluation.

Below we see the effect of the sampling mask on the ground truth, correpsonding k-t space and naive zero-filled estimate:

Poster figure 1:

L+S

Classical method of of Low-rank + Sparsity (L+S) [ Otazo, 2015 ], with the individual L and S components:

ADD details of what the regularisation parameters and PSNR value is

Unrolled infimal convolution (two denoisers)

Trained in the usual unrolled fashion for a fixed number of iterations [following Monga, 2020 ]

Ground truth vs unrolled infimal convolution with two denoisers

PnP-DEQ-IC

Trained via deep equilibrium framework with two denoisers [ Gilton, 2021 ].

Ground truth vs DEQ result - work in progress

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