Coronary magnetic resonance angiography (CMRA) scans are generally time-consuming. CMRA with compressed sensing (CS) and artificial intelligence (AI) (CSAI CMRA) is expected to shorten the imaging time while maintaining image quality. This study aimed to evaluate the usefulness of CS and AI for non-contrast CMRA. Twenty volunteers underwent both CS and conventional CMRA. Conventional CMRA employed parallel imaging (PI) with an acceleration factor of 2. CS CMRA employed a combination of PI and CS with an acceleration factor of 3. Deep learning reconstruction was performed offline on the CS CMRA data after scanning, which was defined as CSAI CMRA. We compared the imaging time, image quality, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), and vessel sharpness for each CMRA scan. The CS CMRA scan time was significantly shorter than that of conventional CMRA (460 s [343,753 s] vs. 727 s [567,939 s], p < 0.001). The image quality scores of the left anterior descending artery (LAD) and left circumflex artery (LCX) were significantly higher in conventional CMRA (LAD: 3.3 ± 0.7, LCX: 3.3 ± 0.7) and CSAI CMRA (LAD: 3.7 ± 0.6, LCX: 3.5 ± 0.7) than the CS CMRA (LAD: 2.9 ± 0.6, LCX: 2.9 ± 0.6) (p < 0.05). The right coronary artery scores did not vary among the three groups (p = 0.087). The SNR and CNR were significantly higher in CSAI CMRA (SNR: 12.3 [9.7, 13.7], CNR: 12.3 [10.5, 14.5]) and CS CMRA (SNR: 10.5 [8.2, 12.6], CNR: 9.5 [7.9, 12.6]) than conventional CMRA (SNR: 9.0 [7.8, 11.1], CNR: 7.7 [6.0, 10.1]) (p < 0.01). The vessel sharpness was significantly higher in CSAI CMRA (LAD: 0.87 [0.78, 0.91]) (p < 0.05), with no significant difference between the CS CMRA (LAD: 0.77 [0.71, 0.83]) and conventional CMRA (LAD: 0.77 [0.71, 0.86]). CSAI CMRA can shorten the imaging time while maintaining good image quality.

The aim of the present article is to enrich the comprehension of iterative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstructions, including compressed sensing (CS) and iterative deep learning (DL) reconstructions, by describing them in the general framework of finite-dimensional inner-product spaces. In particular, we show that image-space preconditioning (ISP) and data-space preconditioning (DSP) can be formulated as non-conventional inner-products. The main gain of our reformulation is an embedding of ISP in the variational formulation of the MRI reconstruction problem (in an algorithm-independent way) which allows in principle to naturally and systematically propagate ISP in all iterative reconstructions, including many iterative DL and CS reconstructions where preconditioning is lacking. The way in which we apply linear algebraic tools to MRI reconstructions as presented in this article is a novelty. A secondary aim of our article is to offer a certain didactic material to scientists who are new in the field of MRI reconstruction. Since we explore here some mathematical concepts of reconstruction, we take that opportunity to recall some principles that may be understood for experts, but which may be hard to find in the literature for beginners. In fact, the description of many mathematical tools of MRI reconstruction is fragmented in the literature or sometimes missing because considered as a general knowledge. Further, some of those concepts can be found in mathematic manuals, but not in a form that is oriented toward MRI. For example, we think of the conjugate gradient descent, the notion of derivative with respect to non-conventional inner products, or simply the notion of adjoint. The authors believe therefore that it is beneficial for their field of research to dedicate some space to such a didactic material.

The noise emergence in the digital image can occur throughout image acquisition, transmission, and processing steps. Consequently, eliminating the noise from the digital image is required before further processing. This study aims to denoise noisy images (including Magnetic Resonance Images (<b>MRIs</b>)) by employing our proposed image denoising approach. This proposed approach is based on the Stationary Wavelet Transform (<b>SWT 2-D</b>) and the <b>2 - D</b> Dual-Tree Discrete Wavelet Transform (<b>DWT</b>). The first step of this approach consists of applying the 2 - D Dual-Tree DWT to the noisy image to obtain noisy wavelet coefficients. The second step of this approach consists of denoising each of these coefficients by applying an SWT 2-D based denoising technique. The denoised image is finally obtained by applying the inverse of the 2-D Dual-Tree <b>DWT</b> to the denoised coefficients obtained in the second step. The proposed image denoising approach is evaluated by comparing it to four denoising techniques existing in literature. The latters are the image denoising technique based on thresholding in the <b>SWT-2D</b> domain, the image denoising technique based on deep neural network, the image denoising technique based on soft thresholding in the domain of 2-D Dual-Tree DWT, and Non-local Means Filter. The proposed denoising approach, and the other four techniques previously mentioned, are applied to a number of noisy grey scale images and noisy Magnetic Resonance Images (MRIs) and the obtained results are in terms of <b>PSNR</b> (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio), <b>SSIM</b> (Structural Similarity), <b>NMSE</b> (Normalized Mean Square Error) and Feature Similarity (<b>FSIM</b>). These results show that the proposed image denoising approach outperforms the other denoising techniques applied for our evaluation. In comparison with the four denoising techniques applied for our evaluation, the proposed approach permits to obtain highest values of <b>PSNR, SSIM</b> and <b>FSIM</b> and the lowest values of <b>NMSE</b>. Moreover, in cases where the noise level <b>σ = 10</b> or <b>σ = 20</b>, this approach permits the elimination of the noise from the noisy images and introduces slight distortions on the details of the original images. However, in case where <b>σ = 30</b> or <b>σ = 40</b>, this approach eliminates a great part of the noise and introduces some distortions on the original images. The performance of this approach is proven by comparing it to four image denoising techniques existing in literature. These techniques are the denoising technique based on thresholding in the SWT-2D domain, the image denoising technique based on a deep neural network, the image denoising technique based on soft thresholding in the domain of <b>2 - D</b> Dual-Tree <b>DWT</b> and the Non-local Means Filter. All these denoising techniques, including our approach, are applied to a number of noisy grey scale images and noisy <b>MRIs</b>, and the obtained results are in terms of <b>PSNR</b> (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio), <b>SSIM</b>(Structural Similarity), <b>NMSE</b> (Normalized Mean Square Error) and <b>FSIM</b> (Feature Similarity). These results show that this proposed approach outperforms the four denoising techniques applied for our evaluation.

Ultrasound microvascular imaging (UMI) is often hindered by low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), especially in contrast-free or deep tissue scenarios, which impairs subsequent vascular quantification and reliable disease diagnosis. To address this challenge, we propose Half-Angle-to-Half-Angle (HA2HA), a self-supervised denoising framework specifically designed for UMI. HA2HA constructs training pairs from complementary angular subsets of beamformed radio-frequency (RF) blood flow data, across which vascular signals remain consistent while noise varies. HA2HA was trained using in-vivo contrast-free pig kidney data and validated across diverse datasets, including contrast-free and contrast-enhanced data from pig kidneys, as well as human liver and kidney. An improvement exceeding 15 dB in both contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) and SNR was observed, indicating a substantial enhancement in image quality. In addition to power Doppler imaging, denoising directly in the RF domain is also beneficial for other downstream processing such as color Doppler imaging (CDI). CDI results of human liver derived from the HA2HA-denoised signals exhibited improved microvascular flow visualization, with a suppressed noisy background. HA2HA offers a label-free, generalizable, and clinically applicable solution for robust vascular imaging in both contrast-free and contrast-enhanced UMI.

The temporal interpolation task for 4D medical imaging, plays a crucial role in clinical practice of respiratory motion modeling. Following the simplified linear-motion hypothesis, existing approaches adopt optical flow-based models to interpolate intermediate frames. However, realistic respiratory motions should be nonlinear and quasi-periodic with specific frequencies. Intuited by this property, we resolve the temporal interpolation task from the frequency perspective, and propose a Fourier basis-guided Diffusion model, termed FB-Diff. Specifically, due to the regular motion discipline of respiration, physiological motion priors are introduced to describe general characteristics of temporal data distributions. Then a Fourier motion operator is elaborately devised to extract Fourier bases by incorporating physiological motion priors and case-specific spectral information in the feature space of Variational Autoencoder. Well-learned Fourier bases can better simulate respiratory motions with motion patterns of specific frequencies. Conditioned on starting and ending frames, the diffusion model further leverages well-learned Fourier bases via the basis interaction operator, which promotes the temporal interpolation task in a generative manner. Extensive results demonstrate that FB-Diff achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) perceptual performance with better temporal consistency while maintaining promising reconstruction metrics. Codes are available.

To evaluate the effects of super-resolution deep learning-based reconstruction (SR-DLR) on thin-slice T2-weighted hippocampal MR image quality using 3 T MRI, in both human volunteers and phantoms. Thirteen healthy volunteers underwent hippocampal MRI at standard and high resolutions. Original (standard-resolution; StR) images were reconstructed with and without deep learning-based reconstruction (DLR) (Matrix = 320 × 320), and with SR-DLR (Matrix = 960 × 960). High-resolution (HR) images were also reconstructed with/without DLR (Matrix = 960 × 960). Contrast, contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), and septum slope were analyzed. Two radiologists evaluated the images for noise, contrast, artifacts, sharpness, and overall quality. Quantitative and qualitative results are reported as medians and interquartile ranges (IQR). Comparisons used the Wilcoxon signed-rank test with Holm correction. We also scanned an American College of Radiology (ACR) phantom to evaluate the ability of our SR-DLR approach to reduce artifacts induced by zero-padding interpolation (ZIP). SR-DLR exhibited contrast comparable to original images and significantly higher than HR-images. Its slope was comparable to that of HR images but was significantly steeper than that of StR images (p < 0.01). Furthermore, the CNR of SR-DLR (10.53; IQR: 10.08, 11.69) was significantly superior to the StR-images without DLR (7.5; IQR: 6.4, 8.37), StR-images with DLR (8.73; IQR: 7.68, 9.0), HR-images without DLR (2.24; IQR: 1.43, 2.38), and HR-images with DLR (4.84; IQR: 2.99, 5.43) (p < 0.05). In the phantom study, artifacts induced by ZIP were scarcely observed when using SR-DLR. SR-DLR for hippocampal MRI potentially improves image quality beyond that of actual HR-images while reducing acquisition time.

Image quality assessment (IQA) is crucial in the evaluation stage of novel algorithms operating on images, including traditional and machine learning based methods. Due to the lack of available quality-rated medical images, most commonly used IQA methods employing reference images (i.e. full-reference IQA) have been developed and tested for natural images. Reported application inconsistencies arising when employing such measures for medical images are not surprising, as they rely on different properties than natural images. In photoacoustic imaging (PAI), especially, standard benchmarking approaches for assessing the quality of image reconstructions are lacking. PAI is a multi-physics imaging modality, in which two inverse problems have to be solved, which makes the application of IQA measures uniquely challenging due to both, acoustic and optical, artifacts. To support the development and testing of full- and no-reference IQA measures we assembled PhotIQA, a data set consisting of 1134 reconstructed photoacoustic (PA) images that were rated by 2 experts across five quality properties (overall quality, edge visibility, homogeneity, inclusion and background intensity), where the detailed rating enables usage beyond PAI. To allow full-reference assessment, highly characterised imaging test objects were used, providing a ground truth. Our baseline experiments show that HaarPSI$_{med}$ significantly outperforms SSIM in correlating with the quality ratings (SRCC: 0.83 vs. 0.62). The dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13325196.

Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF) enables fast quantitative imaging by matching signal evolutions to a predefined dictionary. However, conventional dictionary matching suffers from exponential growth in computational cost and memory usage as the number of parameters increases, limiting its scalability to multi-parametric mapping. To address this, recent work has explored deep learning-based approaches as alternatives to DM. We propose GAST-Mamba, an end-to-end framework that combines a dual Mamba-based encoder with a Gate-Aware Spatial-Temporal (GAST) processor. Built on structured state-space models, our architecture efficiently captures long-range spatial dependencies with linear complexity. On 5 times accelerated simulated MRF data (200 frames), GAST-Mamba achieved a T1 PSNR of 33.12~dB, outperforming SCQ (31.69~dB). For T2 mapping, it reached a PSNR of 30.62~dB and SSIM of 0.9124. In vivo experiments further demonstrated improved anatomical detail and reduced artifacts. Ablation studies confirmed that each component contributes to performance, with the GAST module being particularly important under strong undersampling. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of GAST-Mamba for accurate and robust reconstruction from highly undersampled MRF acquisitions, offering a scalable alternative to traditional DM-based methods.

Deep learning (DL) reconstruction shows potential in reducing MRI acquisition times while preserving image quality, but the impact of varying acceleration factors on knee MRI diagnostic accuracy remains undefined. Evaluate diagnostic performance of twofold, fourfold, and sixfold DL-accelerated knee MRI protocols versus standard protocols. In this prospective study, 71 consecutive patients underwent knee MRI with standard, DL2, DL4, and DL6 accelerated protocols. Four radiologists assessed ligament tears, meniscal lesions, bone marrow edema, chondropathy, and extensor abnormalities. Sensitivity, specificity, and interobserver agreement were calculated. DL2 and DL4 demonstrated high diagnostic accuracy. For ACL tears, DL2/DL4 achieved 98-100% sensitivity/specificity, while DL6 showed reduced sensitivity (91-96%). In meniscal evaluation, DL2 maintained 96-100% sensitivity and 98-100% specificity; DL4 showed 94-98% sensitivity and 97-99% specificity. DL6 exhibited decreased sensitivity (82-92%) for subtle lesions. Bone marrow edema detection remained excellent across acceleration factors. Interobserver agreement was excellent for DL2/DL4 (W = 0.91-0.97) and good for DL6 (W = 0.78-0.89). DL2 protocols demonstrate performance nearly identical to standard protocols, while DL4 maintains acceptable diagnostic accuracy for most pathologies. DL6 shows reduced sensitivity for subtle abnormalities, particularly among less experienced readers. DL2 and DL4 protocols represent optimal balance between acquisition time reduction (50-75%) and diagnostic confidence.