Purpose: To improve image quality and accelerate the acquisition of 3D MRF. Methods: Building on the multi-axis spiral-projection MRF technique, a subspace reconstruction with locally low rank (LLR) constraint and a modified spiral-projection spatiotemporal encoding scheme termed tiny-golden-angle-shuffling (TGAS) were implemented for rapid whole-brain high-resolution quantitative mapping. The LLR regularization parameter and the number of subspace bases were tuned using retrospective in-vivo data and simulated examinations, respectively. B0 inhomogeneity correction using multi-frequency interpolation was incorporated into the subspace reconstruction to further improve the image quality by mitigating blurring caused by off-resonance effect. Results: The proposed MRF acquisition and reconstruction framework can produce provide high quality 1-mm isotropic whole-brain quantitative maps in a total acquisition time of 1 minute 55 seconds, with higher-quality results than ones obtained from the previous approach in 6 minutes. The comparison of quantitative results indicates that neither the subspace reconstruction nor the TGAS trajectory induce bias for T1 and T2 mapping. High quality whole-brain MRF data were also obtained at 0.66-mm isotropic resolution in 4 minutes using the proposed technique, where the increased resolution was shown to improve visualization of subtle brain structures. Conclusion: The proposed TGAS-SPI-MRF with optimized spiral-projection trajectory and subspace reconstruction can enable high-resolution quantitative mapping with faster acquisition speed.
@article{arxiv.2108.05985,
title = {Optimized multi-axis spiral projection MR fingerprinting with subspace reconstruction for rapid whole-brain high-isotropic-resolution quantitative imaging},
author = {Xiaozhi Cao and Congyu Liao and Siddharth Srinivasan Iyer and Zhixing Wang and Zihan Zhou and Erpeng Dai and Gilad Liberman and Zijing Dong and Ting Gong and Hongjian He and Jianhui Zhong and Berkin Bilgic and Kawin Setsompop},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.05985},
year = {2022}
}