Neural Architecture Search for compressed sensing Magnetic Resonance image reconstruction

Recent works have demonstrated that deep learning (DL) based compressed sensing (CS) implementation can accelerate Magnetic Resonance (MR) Imaging by reconstructing MR images from sub-sampled k-space data. However, network architectures adopted in previous methods are all designed by handcraft. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithms can automatically build neural network architectures which have outperformed human designed ones in several vision tasks. Inspired by this, here we proposed a novel and efficient network for the MR image reconstruction problem via NAS instead of manual attempts. Particularly, a specific cell structure, which was integrated into the model-driven MR reconstruction pipeline, was automatically searched from a flexible pre-defined operation search space in a differentiable manner. Experimental results show that our searched network can produce better reconstruction results compared to previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of PSNR and SSIM with 4∼6 times fewer computation resources. Extensive experiments were conducted to analyze how hyper-parameters affect reconstruction performance and the searched structures. The generalizability of the searched architecture was also evaluated on different organ MR datasets. Our proposed method can reach a better trade-off between computation cost and reconstruction performance for MR reconstruction problem with good generalizability and offer insights to design neural networks for other medical image applications. The evaluation code will be available at https://github.com/yjump/NAS-for-CSMRI.