Premium
Targeted vessel reconstruction in non‐contrast‐enhanced steady‐state free precession angiography
Author(s) -
Ilicak Efe,
Cetin Suheyla,
Bulut Elif,
Oguz Kader Karli,
Saritas Emine Ulku,
Unal Gozde,
Çukur Tolga
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
nmr in biomedicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.278
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1099-1492
pISSN - 0952-3480
DOI - 10.1002/nbm.3497
Subject(s) - aliasing , steady state free precession imaging , undersampling , contrast (vision) , computer science , artificial intelligence , magnetic resonance angiography , compressed sensing , computer vision , image quality , segmentation , acceleration , angiography , precession , iterative reconstruction , steady state (chemistry) , mathematics , magnetic resonance imaging , radiology , medicine , physics , image (mathematics) , chemistry , classical mechanics , astronomy
Image quality in non‐contrast‐enhanced (NCE) angiograms is often limited by scan time constraints. An effective solution is to undersample angiographic acquisitions and to recover vessel images with penalized reconstructions. However, conventional methods leverage penalty terms with uniform spatial weighting, which typically yield insufficient suppression of aliasing interference and suboptimal blood/background contrast. Here we propose a two‐stage strategy where a tractographic segmentation is employed to auto‐extract vasculature maps from undersampled data. These maps are then used to incur spatially adaptive sparsity penalties on vascular and background regions. In vivo steady‐state free precession angiograms were acquired in the hand, lower leg and foot. Compared with regular non‐adaptive compressed sensing (CS) reconstructions (CS low ), the proposed strategy improves blood/background contrast by 71.3 ± 28.9% in the hand (mean ± s.d. across acceleration factors 1–8), 30.6 ± 11.3% in the lower leg and 28.1 ± 7.0% in the foot (signed‐rank test, P < 0.05 at each acceleration). The proposed targeted reconstruction can relax trade‐offs between image contrast, resolution and scan efficiency without compromising vessel depiction. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.