Phase unwinding for dictionary compression with multiple channel transmission in magnetic resonance fingerprinting

Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting reconstructions can become computationally intractable with multiple transmit channels, if the B₁⁺ phases are included in the dictionary. We describe a general method that allows to omit the transmit phases. We show that this enables straightforward implementation of dictionary compression to further reduce the problem dimensionality.

We merged the raw data of each RF source into a single k-space dataset, extracted the transceiver phases from the corresponding reconstructed images and used them to unwind the phase in each time frame. All phase-unwound time frames were combined in a single set before performing SVD-based compression. We conducted synthetic, phantom and in-vivo experiments to demonstrate the feasibility of SVD-based compression in the case of two-channel transmission.

Unwinding the phases before SVD-based compression yielded artifact-free parameter maps. For fully sampled acquisitions, parameters were accurate with as few as 6 compressed time frames. SVD-based compression performed well in-vivo with highly under-sampled acquisitions using 16 compressed time frames, which reduced reconstruction time from 750 to 25min.

Our method reduces the dimensions of the dictionary atoms and enables to implement any fingerprint compression strategy in the case of multiple transmit channels.