Sparse Reconstruction of Compressive Sensing Magnetic Resonance Imagery using a Cross Domain Stochastic Fully Connected Conditional Random Field Framework

Abstract

Prostate cancer is a major health care concern in our society. Early detection of prostate cancer is crucial in the successful treatment of the disease. Many current methods used in detecting prostate cancer can either be inconsistent or invasive and discomforting to the patient. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has demonstrated its ability as a non-invasive and non-ionizing medical imaging modality with a lengthy acquisition time that can be used for the early diagnosis of cancer. Speeding up the MRI acquisition process can greatly increase the number of early detections for prostate cancer diagnosis. Compressive sensing has exhibited the ability to reduce the imaging time for MRI by sampling a sparse yet sufficient set of measurements. Compressive sensing strategies are usually accompanied by strong reconstruction algorithms. This work presents a comprehensive framework for a cross-domain stochastically fully connected conditional random field (CD-SFCRF) reconstruction approach to facilitate compressive sensing MRI. This approach takes into account original k-space measurements made by the MRI machine with neighborhood and spatial consistencies of the image in the spatial domain. This approach facilitates the difference in domain between MRI measurements made in the k-space, and the reconstruction results in spatial domain. An adaptive extension of the CD-SFCRF approach that takes into account regions of interest in the image and changes the CD-SFCRF neighborhood connectivity based on importance is presented and tested as well. Finally, a compensated CD-SFCRF approach that takes into account MRI machine imaging apparatus properties to correct for degradations and aberrations from the image acquisition process is presented and tested. Clinical MRI data were collected from twenty patients with ground truth data examined and con firmed by an expert radiologist with multiple years of prostate cancer diagnosis experience. Compressive sensing simulations were performed and the reconstruction results show the CD-SFCRF and extension frameworks having noticeable improvements over state of the art methods. Tissue structure and image details are well preserved while sparse sampling artifacts were reduced and eliminated. Future work on this framework include extending the current work in multiple ways. Extensions including integration into computer aided diagnosis applications as well as improving on the compressive sensing strategy.