Paper ID: 2401.12004

NLCG-Net: A Model-Based Zero-Shot Learning Framework for Undersampled Quantitative MRI Reconstruction

Xinrui Jiang, Yohan Jun, Jaejin Cho, Mengze Gao, Xingwang Yong, Berkin Bilgic

Typical quantitative MRI (qMRI) methods estimate parameter maps after image reconstructing, which is prone to biases and error propagation. We propose a Nonlinear Conjugate Gradient (NLCG) optimizer for model-based T2/T1 estimation, which incorporates U-Net regularization trained in a scan-specific manner. This end-to-end method directly estimates qMRI maps from undersampled k-space data using mono-exponential signal modeling with zero-shot scan-specific neural network regularization to enable high fidelity T1 and T2 mapping. T2 and T1 mapping results demonstrate the ability of the proposed NLCG-Net to improve estimation quality compared to subspace reconstruction at high accelerations.

Submitted: Jan 22, 2024