A motion-corrected deep-learning reconstruction framework for accelerating whole-heart MRI in patients with congenital heart disease.

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Abstract

MRI is an important imaging modality for the assessment and management of adult patients with congenital heart disease (CHD). However, conventional techniques for 3D whole-heart acquisition involve long and unpredictable scan times and methods that accelerate scans via k-space undersampling often rely on long iterative reconstructions. Deep-learning-based reconstruction methods have recently attracted much interest due to their capacity to provide fast reconstructions whilst often outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. In this study, we sought to adapt and validate a non-rigid motion-corrected model-based deep-learning (MoCo-MoDL) reconstruction framework for 3D whole-heart MRI in a CHD patient cohort.The previously proposed deep-learning reconstruction framework MoCo-MoDL, which incorporates a non-rigid motion-estimation network and a denoising regularisation network within an unrolled iterative reconstruction, was trained in an end-to-end manner using 39 CHD patient datasets. Once trained, the framework was evaluated in 8 CHD patient datasets acquired with seven-fold prospective undersampling. Reconstruction quality was compared with the state-of-the-art non-rigid motion-corrected patch-based low-rank reconstruction method (NR-PROST) and against reference images (acquired with three-or-four-fold undersampling and reconstructed with NR-PROST).Seven-fold undersampled scan times were 2.1 ± 0.3 minutes and reconstruction times were  ~ 30 seconds, approximately 240 times faster than an NR-PROST reconstruction. Image quality comparable to the reference images was achieved using the proposed MoCo-MoDL framework, with no statistically significant differences found in any of the assessed quantitative or qualitative image quality measures. Additionally, expert image quality scores indicated the MoCo-MoDL reconstructions were consistently of a higher quality than the NR-PROST reconstructions of the same data, with the differences in 12 of the 22 scores measured for individual vascular structures found to be statistically significant.The MoCo-MoDL framework was applied to an adult CHD patient cohort, achieving good quality 3D whole-heart images from  ~ 2-minute scans with reconstruction times of  ~ 30 seconds.Copyright © 2024. Published by Elsevier Inc.