Highly accelerated 3D dynamic contrast enhanced MRI from sparse spiral sampling using integrated partial separability model and JSENSE

Dynamic contrast enhanced MRI requires high spatial resolution for morphological information and high temporal resolution for contrast pharmacokinetics. The current techniques usually have to compromise the spatial information for the required temporal resolution. This paper presents a novel method that effectively integrates sparse sampling, parallel imaging, partial separable (PS) model, and sparsity constraints for highly accelerated DCE-MRI. Phased array coils were used to continuously acquire data from a stack of variable-density spiral trajectory with a golden angle. In reconstruction, the sparsity constraints, the coil sensitivities, spatial and temporal bases of the PS model are jointly estimated through alternating optimization. Experimental results from in vivo DCE liver imaging data show that the proposed method is able to achieve high spatial and temporal resolutions at the same time.