A Modified Phase Cycling Method for Complex-Valued MRI Reconstruction

The phase cycling method is a state-of-the-art method to reconstruct complex-valued MR image. However, when it follows practical two-dimensional (2D) subsampling Cartesian acquisition which is only enforcing random sampling in the phase-encoding direction, a number of artifacts in magnitude appear. A modified approach is proposed to remove these artifacts under practical MRI subsampling, by adding one-dimensional total variation (TV) regularization into the phase cycling method to "pre-process" the magnitude component before its update. Furthermore, an operation used in SFISTA is employed to update the magnitude and phase images for better solutions. The results of the experiments show the ability of the proposed method to eliminate the ring artifacts and improve the magnitude reconstruction.