Spatio-Temporal Deep Learning-Based Undersampling Artefact Reduction for 2D Radial Cine MRI With Limited Training Data

In this work we reduce undersampling artefacts in two-dimensional (2D) golden-angle radial cine cardiac MRI by applying a modified version of the U-net. The network is trained on 2D spatio-temporal slices which are previously extracted from the image sequences. We compare our approach to two 2D and a 3D deep learning-based post processing methods, three iterative reconstruction methods and two recently proposed methods for dynamic cardiac MRI based on 2D and 3D cascaded networks. Our method outperforms the 2D spatially trained U-net and the 2D spatio-temporal U-net. Compared to the 3D spatio-temporal U-net, our method delivers comparable results, but requiring shorter training times and less training data. Compared to the compressed sensing-based methods kt-FOCUSS and a total variation regularized reconstruction approach, our method improves image quality with respect to all reported metrics. Further, it achieves competitive results when compared to the iterative reconstruction method based on adaptive regularization with dictionary learning and total variation and when compared to the methods based on cascaded networks, while only requiring a small fraction of the computational and training time. A persistent homology analysis demonstrates that the data manifold of the spatio-temporal domain has a lower complexity than the one of the spatial domain and therefore, the learning of a projection-like mapping is facilitated. Even when trained on only one single subject without data-augmentation, our approach yields results which are similar to the ones obtained on a large training dataset. This makes the method particularly suitable for training a network on limited training data. Finally, in contrast to the spatial 2D U-net, our proposed method is shown to be naturally robust with respect to image rotation in image space and almost achieves rotation-equivariance where neither data-augmentation nor a particular network design are required.