Improved Low-Rank Filtering of MR Spectroscopic Imaging Data With Pre-Learnt Subspace and Spatial Constraints

To investigate the use of pre-learnt subspace and spatial constraints for denoising magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) data.

We exploit the partial separability or subspace structures of high-dimensional MRSI data for denoising. More specifically, we incorporate a subspace model with pre-learnt spectral basis into the low-rank approximation (LORA) method. Spectral basis is determined based on empirical prior distributions of the spectral parameters variations learnt from auxiliary training data; spatial priors are also incorporated as is done in LORA to further improve denoising performance.

The effects of the explicit subspace and spatial constraints in reducing estimation bias and variance have been analyzed using Cramér-Rao Lower bound analysis, Monte-Carlo study, and experimental study.

The denoising effectiveness of LORA can be significantly improved by incorporating pre-learnt spectral basis and spatial priors into LORA.

This study provides an effective method for denoising MRSI data along with comprehensive analyses of its performance. The proposed method is expected to be useful for a wide range of studies using MRSI.