Clinical image quality assessment of accelerated magnetic resonance neuroimaging using compressed sensing

The aim of this study was to determine to what degree current compressed sensing methods are capable of accelerating clinical magnetic resonance neuroimaging sequences.

Two 2-dimensional clinical sequences were chosen for this study because of their long scan times. A pilot study was used to establish the sampling scheme and regularization parameter needed in compressed sensing reconstruction. These findings were used in a subsequent blinded study in which images reconstructed using compressed sensing were evaluated by 2 board-certified neuroradiologists. Image quality was evaluated at up to 10 anatomical features.

The findings indicate that compressed sensing may provide 2-fold acceleration of certain clinical magnetic resonance neuroimaging sequences. A global ringing artifact and image blurring were identified as the 2 primary artifacts that would hinder the ability to confidently discern abnormality.

Compressed sensing is able to moderately accelerate certain neuroimaging sequences without severe loss of clinically relevant information. For those sequences with coarser spatial resolution and/or at a higher acceleration factor, artifacts degrade the quality of the reconstructed image to a point where they are of little to no clinical value.