Efficient directionality-driven dictionary learning for compressive sensing magnetic resonance imaging reconstruction

Compressed sensing is an acquisition strategy that possesses great potential to accelerate magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) within the ambit of existing hardware, by enforcing sparsity on MR image slices. Compared to traditional reconstruction methods, dictionary learning-based reconstruction algorithms, which locally sparsify image patches, have been found to boost the reconstruction quality. However, due to the learning complexity, they have to be independently employed on successive MR undersampled slices one at a time. This causes them to forfeit prior knowledge of the anatomical structure of the region of interest. An MR reconstruction algorithm is proposed that employs the double sparsity model coupled with online sparse dictionary learning to learn directional features of the region under observation from existing prior knowledge. This is found to enhance the capability of sparsely representing directional features in an MR image and results in better reconstructions. The proposed framework is shown to have superior performance compared to state-of-art MRI reconstruction algorithms under noiseless and noisy conditions for various undersampling percentages and distinct scanning strategies.