Prospectively accelerated dynamic speech magnetic resonance imaging at 3 T using a self-navigated spiral-based...

This work develops and evaluates a self-navigated variable density spiral (VDS)-based manifold regularization scheme to prospectively improve dynamic speech magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at 3 T. Short readout duration spirals (1.3-ms long) were used to minimize sensitivity to off-resonance. A custom 16-channel speech coil was used for improved parallel imaging of vocal tract structures. The manifold model leveraged similarities between frames sharing similar vocal tract postures without explicit motion binning. The self-navigating capability of VDS was leveraged to learn the Laplacian structure of the manifold. Reconstruction was posed as a sensitivity-encoding-based nonlocal soft-weighted temporal regularization scheme. Our approach was compared with view-sharing, low-rank, temporal finite difference, extra dimension-based sparsity reconstruction constraints. Undersampling experiments were conducted on five volunteers performing repetitive and arbitrary speaking tasks at different speaking rates. Quantitative evaluation in terms of mean square error over moving edges was performed in a retrospective undersampling experiment on one volunteer. For prospective undersampling, blinded image quality evaluation in the categories of alias artifacts, spatial blurring, and temporal blurring was performed by three experts in voice research. Region of interest analysis at articulator boundaries was performed in both experiments to assess articulatory motion. Improved performance with manifold reconstruction constraints was observed over existing constraints. With prospective undersampling, a spatial resolution of 2.4 × 2.4 mm²/pixel and a temporal resolution of 17.4 ms/frame for single-slice imaging, and 52.2 ms/frame for concurrent three-slice imaging, were achieved. We demonstrated implicit motion binning by analyzing the mechanics of the Laplacian matrix. Manifold regularization demonstrated superior image quality scores in reducing spatial and temporal blurring compared with all other reconstruction constraints. While it exhibited faint (nonsignificant) alias artifacts that were similar to temporal finite difference, it provided statistically significant improvements compared with the other constraints. In conclusion, the self-navigated manifold regularized scheme enabled robust high spatiotemporal resolution dynamic speech MRI at 3 T.