MC-PDNet: Deep Unrolled Neural Network For Multi-Contrast Mr Image Reconstruction From Undersampled K-Space Data

Multi-contrast (MC) MR images are similar in structure and can leverage anatomical structure to perform joint reconstruction especially from a limited number of k-space data in the Compressed Sensing (CS) setting. However CS-based multi-contrast image reconstruction has shown limited performance in these highly accelerated regimes due to the use of hand-crafted group sparsity priors. Deep learning can improve outcomes by learning the joint prior across multiple weighting contrasts. In this work, we extend the primal-dual neural network (PDNet) in the multi-contrast sense. We propose a MC-PDNet architecture which takes full advantage of multi-contrast information. Using an in-house database consisting of images from T2TSE, T2*GRE and FLAIR contrasts acquired in 66 healthy volunteers, we performed a retrospective study from 4-fold under-sampled data. It was shown that MC-PDNet improves image quality by at least 1dB in PSNR for each contrast individually in comparison with PD-Net, U-Net and DISN-5B architectures.