Chinese Journal of Magnetic Resonance ›› 2024, Vol. 41 ›› Issue (4): 454-468.doi: 10.11938/cjmr20243110

• Articles • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Research on Transformer Super-Resolution Reconstruction Algorithm for Ultrafast Spatiotemporal Encoding Magnetic Resonance Imaging

NING Xinzhou1, HUANG Zhen1, CHEN Xiqu1, LIU Xinjie2,3, CHEN Gang2,3, ZHANG Zhi2,3, BAO Qingjia2,3,*(), LIU Chaoyang2,3,4,#()   

  1. 1. School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Wuhan Polytechnic University, Wuhan 430023, China
    2. State Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance and Atomic and Molecular Physics, National Center for Magnetic Resonance in Wuhan (Innovation Academy for Precision Measurement Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Wuhan 430071, China
    3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
    4. Optics Valley Laboratory, Wuhan 430074, China
  • Received:2024-04-16 Published:2024-12-05 Online:2024-05-16
  • Contact: * Tel: 027-87199686, E-mail: qingjia.bao@apm.ac.cn;# Tel: 027-87198790, E-mail: chyliu@apm.ac.cn.

Abstract:

Spatio-temporal encoding (SPEN) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an ultrafast MRI technique. However, resolution of the original image acquired with SPEN is relatively low, requiring super-resolution reconstruction based on sequence physics principles to improve spatial resolution. As the existing SPEN super-resolution reconstruction algorithms based on deep learning have confined abilities to capture long-range dependencies, this paper proposes a transformer-based SPEN MRI super-resolution reconstruction algorithm. An encoder-decoder structure is adopted, and a transformer module is introduced to extract local context information and long-range dependencies of feature maps. Experimental results show that the proposed reconstruction method can reconstruct a super-resolution image with high spatial resolution and no aliasing artifacts from the low-resolution SPEN image without adding additional sampling points. Compared to the existing super-resolution methods, the proposed method achieves better results on both clinical and preclinical datasets.

Key words: ultrafast MRI, spatio-temporal encoding(SPEN), deep learning, super-resolution, image reconstruction

CLC Number: