Iterative Next-Neighbor Regridding (INNG): improved reconstruction from nonuniformly sampled k-space data using...

The reconstruction of MR images from nonrectilinearly sampled data is complicated by the fact that the inverse 2D Fourier transform (FT) cannot be performed directly on the acquired k-space data set. k-Space gridding is commonly used because it is an efficient reconstruction method. However, conventional gridding requires optimized density compensation functions (DCFs) to avoid profile distortions. Oftentimes, the calculation of optimized DCFs presents an additional challenge in obtaining an accurately gridded reconstruction. Another type of gridding algorithm, the block uniform resampling (BURS) algorithm, often requires singular value decomposition (SVD) regularization to avoid amplification of data imperfections, and under some conditions it is difficult to adjust the regularization parameters. In this work, new reconstruction algorithms for nonuniformly sampled k-space data are presented. In the newly proposed algorithms, high-quality reconstructed images are obtained from an iterative reconstruction that is performed using matrices scaled to sizes greater than that of the target image matrix. A second version partitions the sampled k-space region into several blocks to avoid limitations that could result from performing multiple 2D-FFTs on large data matrices. The newly proposed algorithms are a simple alternative approach to previously proposed optimized gridding algorithms.