HFIST-Net: High-throughput fast iterative shrinkage thresholding network for accelerating MR image reconstruction

Compressed sensing (CS) is often used to accelerate magnetic resonance image (MRI) reconstruction from undersampled k-space data. A novelty deeply unfolded networks (DUNs) based method, designed by unfolding a traditional CS-MRI optimization algorithm into deep networks, can provide significantly faster reconstruction speeds than traditional CS-MRI methods while improving image quality.

In this paper, we propose a High-Throughput Fast Iterative Shrinkage Thresholding Network (HFIST-Net) for reconstructing MR images from sparse measurements by combining traditional model-based CS techniques and data-driven deep learning methods. Specifically, the conventional Fast Iterative Shrinkage Thresholding Algorithm (FISTA) method is expanded as a deep network. To break the bottleneck of information transmission, a multi-channel fusion mechanism is proposed to improve the efficiency of information transmission between adjacent network stages. Moreover, a simple yet efficient channel attention block, called Gaussian context transformer (GCT), is proposed to improve the characterization capabilities of deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN,) which utilizes Gaussian functions that satisfy preset relationships to achieve context feature excitation.

T1 and T2 brain MR images from the FastMRI dataset are used to validate the performance of the proposed HFIST-Net. The qualitative and quantitative results showed that our method is superior to those compared state-of-the-art unfolded deep learning networks.

The proposed HFIST-Net is capable of reconstructing more accurate MR image details from highly undersampled k-space data while maintaining fast computational speed.