Total variation was recently introduced in many different magnetic resonance imaging applications. The assumption of total variation is that images consist of areas, which are piecewise constant. However, in many practical magnetic resonance imaging situations, this assumption is not valid due to the inhomogeneities of the exciting B1 field and the receive coils. This work introduces the new concept of total generalized variation for magnetic resonance imaging, a new mathematical framework, which is a generalization of the total variation theory and which eliminates these restrictions. Two important applications are considered in this article, image denoising and image reconstruction from undersampled radial data sets with multiple coils. Apart from simulations, experimental results from in vivo measurements are presented where total generalized variation yielded improved image quality over conventional total variation in all cases. Magn Reson Med, 2011.

A publicly available dataset containing k-space data as well as Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine image data of knee images for accelerated MR image reconstruction using machine learni...

Following the success of deep learning in a wide range of applications, neural network-based machine-learning techniques have received interest as a means of accelerating magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). A number of ideas inspired by deep-learning techniques for computer vision and image processing have been successfully applied to nonlinear image reconstruction in the spirit of compressed sensing for both low-dose computed tomography and accelerated MRI. The additional integration of multicoil information to recover missing k-space lines in the MRI reconstruction process is studied less frequently, even though it is the de facto standard for the currently used accelerated MR acquisitions. This article provides an overview of the recent machine-learning approaches that have been proposed specifically for improving parallel imaging. A general background introduction to parallel MRI is given and structured around the classical view of image- and k-space-based methods. Linear and nonlinear methods are covered, followed by a discussion of the recent efforts to further improve parallel imaging using machine learning and, specifically, artificial neural networks. Image domain-based techniques that introduce improved regularizers are covered as well as k-space-based methods, where the focus is on better interpolation strategies using neural networks. Issues and open problems are discussed and recent efforts for producing open data sets and benchmarks for the community are examined.

Accelerating MRI scans is one of the principal outstanding problems in the MRI research community. Towards this goal, we hosted the second fastMRI competition targeted towards reconstructing MR images with subsampled k-space data. We provided participants with data from 7,299 clinical brain scans (de-identified via a HIPAA-compliant procedure by NYU Langone Health), holding back the fully-sampled data from 894 of these scans for challenge evaluation purposes. In contrast to the 2019 challenge, we focused our radiologist evaluations on pathological assessment in brain images. We also debuted a new Transfer track that required participants to submit models evaluated on MRI scanners from outside the training set. We received 19 submissions from eight different groups. Results showed one team scoring best in both SSIM scores and qualitative radiologist evaluations. We also performed analysis on alternative metrics to mitigate the effects of background noise and collected feedback from the participants to inform future challenges. Lastly, we identify common failure modes across the submissions, highlighting areas of need for future research in the MRI reconstruction community.