Joint estimation of image and coil sensitivities in parallel spiral MRI

Spiral MRI has received increasing attention due to its reduced T* ₂-decay and robustness against bulk physiologic motion. In parallel imaging, spiral trajectories are especially of great interest due to their inherent self-calibration capabilities, which is especially useful for dynamic imaging applications such as fMRI and cardiac imaging. The existing self-calibration techniques for spiral use the k-space center data that are sampled densely in the accelerated acquisition for coil sensitivity estimation. There exists a tradeoff in choosing the radius of the center data: it must be sufficiently large to contain all major spatial frequencies of coil sensitivity, but not too large to cause significant aliasing artifacts due to undersampling below Nyquist rate as the trajectory moves away from the center k-space. To address this tradeoff, we generalize the JSENSE approach, which has demonstrated success in Cartesian case, to spiral trajectory. Specifically, the method jointly estimates the coil sensitivities and reconstructs the desired image through cross validations so that the sensitivities are estimated from the full data recovered by SENSE instead of the center k-space data only, thereby increasing high frequency information without introducing aliasing artifacts. We use experimental results to show the proposed method improves sensitivities, which leads to a more accurate SENSE reconstruction.