Split Bregman multicoil accelerated reconstruction technique: A new framework for rapid reconstruction of cardiac perfusion MRI

Purpose: Rapid reconstruction of undersampled multicoil MRI data with iterative constrained reconstruction method is a challenge. The authors sought to develop a new substitution based variable splitting algorithm for faster reconstruction of multicoil cardiac perfusion MRI data. Methods: The new method, split Bregman multicoil accelerated reconstruction technique (SMART), uses a combination of split Bregman based variable splitting and iterative reweighting techniques to achieve fast convergence. Total variation constraints are used along the spatial and temporal dimensions. The method is tested on nine ECG-gated dog perfusion datasets, acquired with a 30-ray golden ratio radial sampling pattern and ten ungated human perfusion datasets, acquired with a 24-ray golden ratio radial sampling pattern. Image quality and reconstruction speed are evaluated and compared to a gradient descent (GD) implementation and to multicoil k-t SLR, a reconstruction technique that uses a combination of sparsity and low rank constraints. Results: Comparisons based on blur metric and visual inspection showed that SMART images had lower blur and better texture as compared to the GD implementation. On average, the GD based images had an similar to 18% higher blur metric as compared to SMART images. Reconstruction of dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) cardiac perfusion images using the SMART method was similar to 6 times faster than standard gradient descent methods. k-t SLR and SMART produced images with comparable image quality, though SMART was similar to 6.8 times faster than k-t SLR. Conclusions: The SMART method is a promising approach to reconstruct good quality multicoil images from undersampled DCE cardiac perfusion data rapidly. (C) 2016 American Association of Physicists in Medicine.