A Deep Learning Framework for Cardiac MR Under-Sampled Image Reconstruction with a Hybrid Spatial and k-Space Loss Function

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an efficient, non-invasive diagnostic imaging tool for a variety of disorders. In modern MRI systems, the scanning procedure is time-consuming, which leads to problems with patient comfort and causes motion artifacts. Accelerated or parallel MRI has the potential to minimize patient stress as well as reduce scanning time and medical costs. In this paper, a new deep learning MR image reconstruction framework is proposed to provide more accurate reconstructed MR images when under-sampled or aliased images are generated. The proposed reconstruction model is designed based on the conditional generative adversarial networks (CGANs) where the generator network is designed in a form of an encoder–decoder U-Net network. A hybrid spatial and k-space loss function is also proposed to improve the reconstructed image quality by minimizing the L1-distance considering both spatial and frequency domains simultaneously. The proposed reconstruction framework is directly compared when CGAN and U-Net are adopted and used individually based on the proposed hybrid loss function against the conventional L1-norm. Finally, the proposed reconstruction framework with the extended loss function is evaluated and compared against the traditional SENSE reconstruction technique using the evaluation metrics of structural similarity (SSIM) and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). To fine-tune and evaluate the proposed methodology, the public Multi-Coil k-Space OCMR dataset for cardiovascular MR imaging is used. The proposed framework achieves a better image reconstruction quality compared to SENSE in terms of PSNR by 6.84 and 9.57 when U-Net and CGAN are used, respectively. Similarly, it demonstrates SSIM of the reconstructed MR images comparable to the one provided by the SENSE algorithm when U-Net and CGAN are used. Comparing cases where the proposed hybrid loss function is used against the cases with the simple L1-norm, the reconstruction performance can be noticed to improve by 6.84 and 9.57 for U-Net and CGAN, respectively. To conclude this, the proposed framework using CGAN provides the best reconstruction performance compared with U-Net or the conventional SENSE reconstruction techniques. The proposed framework seems to be useful for the practical reconstruction of cardiac images since it can provide better image quality in terms of SSIM and PSNR.