Reconstruction of Simultaneous Multi-Slice MRI Data by Combining Virtual Conjugate Coil Technology and Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

This paper proposes an image reconstruction method for simultaneous multi-slice imaging (SMS) by combining the virtual conjugate coil (VCC) technology and robust artificial-neural-networks for k-space interpolation (RAKI). This method can effectively improve the reconstruction quality, and is named VIRGINIA (VIRtual conjuGate coIls Neural-networks InterpolAtion). VIRGINIA utilizes the complex conjugate symmetry property of the virtual coil concept to generate virtual coil data for training, and obtains better image quality by applying the trained network to the original aliased SMS data. With experimental data, the VIRGINIA method was compared to other reconstruction methods (i.e., RAKI only and slice-GRAPPA) in terms of quantitative indices such as structural similarity index (SSIM), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and root mean square error (RMSE). The results demonstrated that, under some certain slice-acceleration factors, VIRGINIA produced better reconstruction quality than those obtainable by Slice-GRAPPA and RAKI.

Keywords

• magnetic resonance image reconstruction
• simultaneous multi-slice imaging
• robust artificial-neural-networks for k-space interpolation (raki)
• virtual conjugate coil
• convolutional neural network (cnn)