Jacobian weighted temporal total variation for motion compensated compressed sensing reconstruction of dynamic MRI

Purpose: To eliminate the need of spatial intraframe regularization in a recently reported dynamic MRI compressed-sensing-based reconstruction method with motion compensation and to increase its performance.

Theory and Methods: We propose a new regularization metric based on the introduction of a spatial weighting measure given by the Jacobian of the estimated deformations. It shows convenient discretization properties and, as a byproduct, it also provides a theoretical support to a result reported by others based on an intuitive design. The method has been applied to the reconstruction of both short and long axis views of the heart of four healthy volunteers. Quantitative image quality metrics as well as straightforward visual assessment are reported.

Results: Short and long axis reconstructions of cardiac cine MRI sequences have shown superior results than previously reported methods both in terms of quantitative metrics and of visual assessment. Fine details are better preserved due to the lack of additional intraframe regularization, with no significant image artifacts even for an acceleration factor of 12.

Conclusions: The proposed Jacobian Weighted temporal Total Variation results in better reconstructions of highly undersampled cardiac cine MRI than previously proposed methods and sets a theoretical ground for forward and backward predictors used elsewhere.