A deep error correction network for compressed sensing MRI

BACKGROUND: CS-MRI (compressed sensing for magnetic resonance imaging) exploits image sparsity properties to reconstruct MRI from very few Fourier k-space measurements. Due to imperfect modelings in the inverse imaging, state-of-the-art CS-MRI methods tend to leave structural reconstruction errors. Compensating such errors in the reconstruction could help further improve the reconstruction quality. RESULTS: In this work, we propose a DECN (deep error correction network) for CS-MRI. The DECN model consists of three parts, which we refer to as modules: a guide, or template, module, an error correction module, and a data fidelity module. Existing CS-MRI algorithms can serve as the template module for guiding the reconstruction. Using this template as a guide, the error correction module learns a CNN (convolutional neural network) to map the k-space data in a way that adjusts for the reconstruction error of the template image. We propose a deep error correction network. Our experimental results show the proposed DECN CS-MRI reconstruction framework can considerably improve upon existing inversion algorithms by supplementing with an error-correcting CNN. CONCLUSIONS: In the proposed a deep error correction framework, any off-the-shelf CS-MRI algorithm can be used as template generation. Then a deep neural network is used to compensate reconstruction errors. The promising experimental results validate the effectiveness and utility of the proposed framework.