Rapid spatio-temporal MR fingerprinting using physics-informed implicit neural representation

Abstract

The potential of Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF), which allows for rapid and simultaneous multi-parametric quantitative MRI, is often limited by severe aliasing artifacts caused by aggressive undersampling. Conventional MRF approaches typically treat these artifacts as detrimental noise and focus on their removal, often at the cost of either reduced reconstruction speed or increased reliance on large training datasets. Building on the insight that structured aliasing can be leveraged as an informative spatial encoding mechanism, we propose to extend MRF’s encoding capacity to the global spatio-temporal domain by introducing a novel Physics-informed implicit neural MRF (πMRF) framework. πMRF integrates physics-informed spatio-temporal fingerprint modeling with implicit neural representations (INRs), enabling unsupervised, gradient-driven joint estimation of quantitative tissue parameters and coil sensitivity maps (CSMs) with enhanced accuracy and robustness. Specifically, πMRF leverages a scalable component based on physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to facilitate accurate high-dimensional signal modeling and memory-efficient optimization. In addition, a subspace-guided sensitivity regularization is developed to improve the robustness of CSM estimation in highly undersampled scenarios. Experimental results on simulated, phantom, and in vivo datasets demonstrate that πMRF achieves improved quantitative accuracy and robustness even under highly accelerated acquisitions, outperforming state-of-the-art MRF methods.