Elastic AlignedSENSE for Dynamic MR Reconstruction: A Proof of Concept in Cardiac Cine

Numerous methods in the extensive literature on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction exploit temporal redundancy to accelerate cardiac cine. Some of them include motion compensation, which involves high computational costs and long runtimes. In this work, we proposed a method –-elastic alignedSENSE (EAS)–- for the direct reconstruction of a motion-free image plus a set of nonrigid deformations to reconstruct a 2D cardiac sequence. The feasibility of the proposed approach was tested in 2D Cartesian and golden radial multi-coil breath-hold cardiac cine acquisitions. The proposed approach was compared against parallel imaging compressed sense (sPICS) and group-wise motion corrected compressed sense (GWCS) reconstructions. EAS provides better results on objective measures with considerable less runtime when an acceleration factor is higher than 10x. Subjective assessment of an expert, however, invited proposing the combination of EAS and GWCS as a preferable alternative to GWCS or EAS in isolation.