The clinical utility of multi-dimensional MRI applications like multi-parameter mapping and 3D dynamic lung imaging is limited by long acquisition times. Quantification of multiple tissue MRI parameters has been shown to be useful for early detection and diagnosis of various neurological diseases and psychiatric disorders. They also provide useful information about disease progression and treatment efficacy. Dynamic lung imaging enables the diagnosis of abnormalities in respiratory mechanics in dyspnea and regional lung function in pulmonary diseases like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma etc. However, the need for acquisition of multiple contrast weighted images as in case of multi-parameter mapping or multiple time points as in case of pulmonary imaging, makes it less applicable in the clinical setting as it increases the scan time considerably. In order to achieve reasonable scan times, there is often tradeoffs between SNR and resolution.
Since, most MRI images are sparse in known transform domain; they can be recovered from fewer samples. Several compressed sensing schemes have been proposed which exploit the sparsity of the signal in pre-determined transform domains (eg. Fourier transform) or exploit the low rank characteristic of the data. However, these methods perform sub-optimally in the presence of inter-frame motion since the pre-determined dictionary does not account for the motion and the rank of the data is considerably higher. These methods rely on two step approach where they first estimate the dictionary from the low resolution data and using these basis functions they estimate the coefficients by fitting the measured data to the signal model.
The main focus of the thesis is accelerating the multi-parameter mapping and 3D dynamic lung imaging applications to achieve desired volume coverage and spatio-temporal resolution. We propose a novel dictionary learning framework called the Blind compressed sensing (BCS) scheme to recover the underlying data from undersampled measurements, in which the underlying signal is represented as a sparse linear combination of basic functions from a learned dictionary. We also provide an efficient implementation using variable splitting technique to reduce the computational complexity by up to 15 fold. In both multi- parameter mapping and 3D dynamic lung imaging, the comparisons of BCS scheme with other schemes indicates superior performance as it provides a richer presentation of the data. The reconstructions from BCS scheme result in high accuracy parameter maps for parameter imaging and diagnostically relevant image series to characterize respiratory mechanics in pulmonary imaging.