Group feature selection for enhancing information gain in MRI reconstruction

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has revolutionized the radiology. As a leading medical imaging modality, MRI not only visualizes the structures inside body, but also produces functional imaging. However, due to the slow imaging speed constrained by the MR physics, MRI cost is expensive, and patient may feel not comfortable in a scanner for a long time. Parallel MRI has accelerated the imaging speed through the sub-Nyquist sampling strategy and the missing data are interpolated by the multiple coil data acquired. Kernel learning has been used in the parallel MRI reconstruction to learn the interpolation weights and re-construct the undersampled data. However, noise and aliasing artifacts still exist in the reconstructed image and a large number of auto-calibration signal lines are needed. To further improve the kernel learning-based MRI reconstruction and accelerate the speed, this paper proposes a group feature selection strategy to improve the learning performance and enhance the reconstruction quality. An explicit kernel mapping is used for selecting a subset of features which contribute most to estimate the missing k-space data. The experimental results show that the learning behaviours can be better predicted and therefore the reconstructed image quality is improved.