A weighted total variation approach for the atlas-based reconstruction of brain MR data

Compressed sensing is a powerful approach to reconstruct high-quality images using a small number of samples. This paper presents a novel compressed sensing method that uses a probabilistic atlas to impose spatial constraints on the reconstruction of brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. A weighted total variation (TV) model is proposed to characterize the spatial distribution of gradients in the brain, and incorporate this information in the reconstruction process. Experiments on T1-weighted MR images from the ABIDE dataset show our proposed method to outperform the standard uniform TV model, as well as state-of-the-art approaches, for low sampling rates and high noise levels.