Deformation corrected compressed sensing (DC-CS): a novel framework for accelerated dynamic MRI

We propose a novel deformation corrected compressed sensing (DC-CS) framework to recover contrast enhanced dynamic magnetic resonance images from undersampled measurements. We introduce a formulation that is capable of handling a wide class of sparsity/compactness priors on the deformation corrected dynamic signal. In this work, we consider example compactness priors such as sparsity in temporal Fourier domain, sparsity in temporal finite difference domain, and nuclear norm penalty to exploit low rank structure. Using variable splitting, we decouple the complex optimization problem to simpler and well understood sub problems; the resulting algorithm alternates between simple steps of shrinkage-based denoising, deformable registration, and a quadratic optimization step. Additionally, we employ efficient continuation strategies to reduce the risk of convergence to local minima. The decoupling enabled by the proposed scheme enables us to apply this scheme to contrast enhanced MRI applications. Through experiments on numerical phantom and in vivo myocardial perfusion MRI datasets, we observe superior image quality of the proposed DC-CS scheme in comparison to the classical k-t FOCUSS with motion estimation/correction scheme, and demonstrate reduced motion artifacts over classical compressed sensing schemes that utilize the compact priors on the original deformation uncorrected signal.