Organizations: School of Mathematics and Statistics, Huizhou University, Huizhou, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Huizhou University, Huizhou, China
Undersampled magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction aims to recover high-quality images from partially acquired k-space data, thereby reducing scan time. However, missing frequency-domain measurements often lead to residual aliasing artifacts, blurred edges, and loss of local structural details. In this paper, we propose AGGR-Mamba, a lightweight output-stage residual refinement method built upon a Mamba backbone for undersampled brain MRI reconstruction. The Mamba backbone first produces an initial reconstruction, and the proposed refinement modules then correct the remaining local errors and high-frequency artifacts in a controlled residual manner. Specifically, an Attention Refine Head is introduced to recalibrate local anatomical structures, edge textures, and residual-error regions through channel and spatial attention. In addition, a GDFN-style gated residual refinement branch is designed to selectively preserve informative residual features while suppressing redundant or unstable responses. By combining attention-based recalibration with gated residual selection, AGGR-Mamba improves local structure recovery without substantially disturbing the backbone reconstruction. Experiments are conducted on the IXI brain MRI dataset with T1- and T2-weighted images under acceleration factors of R=4 and R=8. The results show that AGGR-Mamba achieves competitive PSNR and SSIM performance across different reconstruction settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed output-stage refinement strategy.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Illustration of the undersampled MRI reconstruction task: undersampled input (left) and AGGR-Mamba reconstruction (right) on IXI-T2 with R=4 . The two rows highlight different regions of the same slice; blue boxes and lines indicate the corresponding enlarged regions.
Fig. 2: Schematic illustration of the proposed AGGR-Mamba method.
Fig. 3: Reconstruction results and error maps of different methods on IXI-T2 R=4 . The zoomed-in regions and error maps are placed below each reconstructed image for visual comparison.
Method
IXI-T1 R=4
IXI-T1 R=8
IXI-T2 R=4
IXI-T2 R=8
PSNR ↑
SSIM(%) ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM(%) ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM(%) ↑
PSNR ↑
SSIM(%) ↑
UNet
37.01
94.07
31.82
90.57
38.06
94.85
33.86
91.98
E2E-VarNet
41.94
98.56
35.72
97.21
42.96
98.69
37.23
97.34
SwinUNET
34.77
94.73
30.59
91.75
37.54
95.11
33.92
92.44
SwinMR
38.30
96.05
33.76
93.65
40.03
96.17
35.75
93.89
ReconFormer
42.36
99.24
33.87
97.51
46.71
99.53
38.34
98.45
TABLE I: Quantitative results of different methods on the IXI dataset. The best performance is marked in bold, while the second-best performance is underlined.
Variant
Attention Refine
GDFN
Joint Fine-tuning
PSNR(dB) ↑
SSIM(%) ↑
Δ PSNR
Mamba Backbone
×
×
×
46.4907
99.38
–
Attention Refine
✓
×
×
46.9393
99.44
+0.4486
Attention Refine + GDFN
✓
✓
×
46.9930
99.44
+0.5023
AGGR-Mamba
✓
✓
✓
46.9945
99.45
+0.5038
TABLE II: Module-wise ablation study on IXI-T2 R=4 . Δ indicates the PSNR gain relative to the Mamba backbone.
Fig. 4: PSNR comparison of different module combinations on IXI-T2 R=4 .
Setting
Late-stage GDFN Fine-tuning
Joint Fine-tuning
Δ PSNR
IXI-T1 R=4
41.7266 / 99.11
41.9360 / 99.11
+0.2094
IXI-T1 R=8
35.3777 / 97.04
35.3879 / 97.04
+0.0102
IXI-T2 R=4
46.9930 / 99.44
46.9945 / 99.45
+0.0015
IXI-T2 R=8
38.4408 / 97.87
38.4789 / 97.88
+0.0381
TABLE III: Comparison between late-stage GDFN fine-tuning and joint fine-tuning on the four IXI test settings. Each cell reports PSNR(dB) / SSIM(%).
Accelerated MRI reconstruction recovers diagnostic images from undersampled k-space data to reduce scan time while preserving anatomical and quantitative information.
Fully sampled MRI requires dense k-space acquisition, leading to long scan times, reduced clinical throughput, and increased sensitivity to patient motion. Accelerated MRI addresses this by acquiring undersampled k-space data and reconstructing the missing information computationally. However, reconstruction from undersampled measurements is highly ill-posed and can introduce aliasing artifacts, noise amplification, and loss of anatomical detail. Although conventional parallel imaging and compressed sensing methods mitigate these issues, and deep learning methods have further improved reconstruction quality, preserving high-frequency structures under aggressive undersampling remains challenging. In this work, we propose a Variational Network with a Wavelet-based U-Net (W-UNet) for accelerated MRI reconstruction. The framework combines physics-guided iterative reconstruction with learnable multi-scale frequency representations. Standard pooling operations are replaced with Discrete Wavelet Transform and Inverse Wavelet Transform modules, enabling lossless downsampling while preserving low-frequency structure and high-frequency edge details. Integrated into the refinement and sensitivity map estimation stages, the proposed design improves artifact suppression, feature preservation, and reconstruction fidelity in both single-coil and multi-coil settings. Experiments on fastMRI knee and M4Raw brain datasets show state-of-the-art performance. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of wavelet-based feature decomposition for accelerated MRI reconstruction.
Yasir Arafat Prodhan, Shaikh Anowarul Fattah
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh · This paper was produced by the IEEE Publication Technology Group. They are in Piscataway, NJ.
MRI reconstruction is an inherently ill-posed inverse problem, since incomplete measurements admit many plausible solutions. This ambiguity becomes more severe under high acceleration, where pixel-domain continuous predictors tend to average over feasible reconstructions and suppress high-frequency anatomy. We address this limitation by moving reconstruction to discrete multi-scale latent space and posing it as autoregressive next-acceleration-scale prediction. Leveraging discrete priors proven effective in visual autoregressive modeling, our method restricts the solution to compact sequences of codebook tokens, enabling sharp reconstructions even from extremely sparse measurements. This discrete autoregressive formulation also aligns naturally with modern large language model post-training techniques. Building on this observation, we introduce on-policy privileged information distillation for visual autoregressive modeling, where a teacher is provided training only privileged context that is unavailable at inference, in our case fully sampled acquisitions, and supervises a student trained on its own rollouts, leading to consistent reconstruction gains. Through extensive experiments on the fastMRI benchmark, we show that our approach delivers improved reconstruction performance across diverse sampling patterns under extreme undersampling. Project website is here.
Low-field magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides affordable access to diagnostic imaging but suffers from prolonged acquisition and limited image quality. Accelerated imaging can be achieved with k-space undersampling, while super-resolution (SR) and image quality transfer (IQT) methods typically rely on spatial-domain post-processing. In this work, we propose a novel framework for reconstructing high-field MR like images directly from undersampled low-field k-space. Our approach employs a k-space dual channel U-Net that processes the real and imaginary components of undersampled k-space to restore missing frequency content. Experiments on low-field brain MRI demonstrate that our k-space-driven image enhancement consistently outperforms the counterpart spatial-domain method. Furthermore, reconstructions from undersampled k-space achieve image quality comparable to full k-space acquisitions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that investigates low-field MRI SR/IQT directly from undersampled k-space.
Daniel Tweneboah Anyimadu, Mohammed M. Abdelsamea, Ahmed Karam Eldaly
Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom · UCL Hawkes Institute, University College London, London, United Kingdom