Design and Implementation of a Novel Processing Pipeline for Magnetic Resonance Images

Abstract

Reconstruction, post-processing and visualization of images are important parts of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In this work, a new open source framework, namely Yet Another Pipeline (YAP), was proposed for reconstruction, post-processing and visualization of MR images. With YAP, researchers can build customized image-processing pipelines with ease. Compared with the existing open source frameworks, YAP has the following features: (1) it has an interface-based design, enabling function extension by plugin development; (2) it uses a script language with straightforward grammar, making it easy to build and modify customized pipelines; (3) it supports branches in the pipelines, facilitating pipeline building and debugging. YAP has been implemented on a commercial MRI system.

Keywords

• magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
• processing pipeline
• Yet Another Pipeline (YAP)
• open source
• medical image processing
• compressed sensing (CS)