Weakly Convex Ridge Regularization for 3D Non-Cartesian MRI Reconstruction

State-of-the-art learned reconstruction methods often rely on black-box modules that, despite their strong performance, raise questions about their interpretability and robustness. Here, we build on a recently proposed image reconstruction method, which is based on embedding data-driven information into a model-based convolutional dictionary regularization via neural network-inferred spatially adaptive sparsity level maps. By means of improved network design and dedicated training strategies, we extend the method to achieve filter-permutation invariance as well as the possibility to change the convolutional dictionary at inference time. We apply our method to low-field MRI and compare it to several other recent deep learning-based methods, also on in vivo data, where the benefit of using a different dictionary is demonstrated. We further assess the method's robustness when tested on in- and out-of-distribution data. When tested on the latter, the proposed method suffers less from the data distribution shift compared to the other learned methods, which we attribute to its reduced reliance on training data due to its underlying model-based reconstruction component.

Conventional cardiac cine MRI relies on breath-hold Cartesian acquisitions, which are vulnerable to motion artifacts and can be uncomfortable or infeasible, particularly for pediatric and other noncompliant patients who cannot reliably hold their breath. Free-breathing radial acquisitions can alleviate these limitations, but robust reconstruction at high acceleration remains challenging due to prominent streak artifacts. To address these limitations, we propose Cine-DL, a clinically oriented framework that couples targeted k-space preprocessing with fast, model-based deep reconstruction. In this pipeline, raw free-breathing radial data undergo retrospective cardiac binning and respiratory gating to resolve cardiac phases and discard motion-corrupted spokes. We then introduce Streak Optimized Coil Compression (SOC), which explicitly preserves cardiac signals while suppressing peripheral interference that typically drives the streak artifacts. The resulting 2D+t cine series is reconstructed with an unrolled network that alternates a ResNet proximal operator with physics-based data consistency updates solved via conjugate gradient. We further employ a memory-efficient training strategy that reduces peak memory usage. We evaluate Cine-DL on free-breathing volunteer data against established baselines (k-t SENSE and iGRASP) and demonstrate clinical translation via hospital deployment on newly acquired patient data. Our experiments show that Cine-DL consistently improves quantitative metrics and visual fidelity, supporting a practical route toward routine, time-sensitive clinical adoption of free-breathing cine MRI.

Accelerated MRI reconstruction recovers images from undersampled k-space. However, different acceleration factors produce distinct artifact patterns. Existing methods often train separate models for each factor, leading to poor cross-factor generalization and high training and storage costs. We propose Shared LoRA, a parameter-efficient framework that freezes the pretrained SHFormer backbone and trains a single shared set of LoRA adapters together with a lightweight gating network. During training, undersampled inputs are generated by randomly sampling acceleration factors and their corresponding sampling masks, enabling the shared adapters to learn reconstruction knowledge across factors. Given the acceleration factor, GateNet generates layer-wise coefficients to dynamically modulate the residual strength of each adapter. Experiments show that Shared LoRA achieves the best or competitive PSNR and SSIM across acceleration factors, while its trainable parameters account for only about 5.3% of the total model parameters. Its performance at lower acceleration factors remains largely unaffected as the jointly trained factor set expands, and it generalizes stably to unseen neighboring factors.