Artifact Reduction in Compressed Sensing Averaging Techniques for High-Resolution Magnetic Resonance Images

This study aims to introduce a new compressed sensing averaging (CSA) technique for the reduction of blurring and/or ringing artifacts, depending on the k-space sampling ratio. A full k-space dataset and three randomly undersampled datasets were obtained for CSA images in a brain phantom and a healthy subject. An additional simulation was performed to assess the effect of the undersampling ratio on the images and the signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). The image sharpness, spatial resolution, and contrast between tissues were analyzed and compared with other CSA techniques. Compared to CSA with multiple acquisition (CSAM) at 25%, 35%, and 45% undersampling, the reduction rates of the k-space lines of CSA with keyhole (CSAK) were 10%, 15%, and 22%, respectively, and the acquisition time was reduced by 16%, 23%, and 32%, respectively. In the simulation performed with a full sampling k-space dataset, the SNR decreased to 10.41, 9.80, and 8.86 in the white matter and 9.69, 9.35, and 8.46 in the gray matter, respectively. In addition, the ringing artifacts became substantially more predominant as the number of sampling lines decreased. The 50% modulation transfer functions were 0.38, 0.43, and 0.54 line pairs per millimeter for CSAM, CSAK with high-frequency sharing (CSAKS), and CSAK with high-frequency copying (CSAKC), respectively. In this study, we demonstrated that the smaller the sampling line, the more severe the ringing artifact, and that the CSAKC technique proposed to overcome the artifacts that occur when using CSA techniques did not generate artifacts, while it increased spatiotemporal resolution.

Automated summary

This study introduced a new compressed sensing averaging (CSA) technique for reducing blurring and ringing artifacts in images, analyzed image quality parameters, and found that ringing artifacts become more prominent with smaller sampling lines in CSA techniques.