Subsampling Decomposition based k-Space Refinement for Accelerated MRI Reconstruction

Abstract

In accelerated MRI reconstruction problem, directly recovering all the missing k-space data from undersampled measurements is highly ill-posed and often leads to suboptimal performance. To address the problem, we propose a novel deep unfolding network (DUN) with subsampling decomposition (SD) based k-space refinement to mitigate the ill-posedness. Our method employs a parallel network architecture with a primary branch unfolded by gradient descent-inspired optimization process (GD-PB) for reconstruction. Additionally, we introduce an SD-based auxiliary branch (SD-AB) that decompose the inverse problem into moderately corrupted subproblems. We design a novel subsampling mask predictor that captures both global and local spatial correlations in k-space, ensuring the SD-AB effectively preserves the most well-reconstructed subsets as reliable region (RR). The RR in SD-AB is used to periodically refine the intermediate outputs of the GD-PB, achieving improved accuracy. Experimental results reveal that our method significantly outperforms conventional and SD-based DUN techniques, achieving superior PSNR and SSIM results compared with cutting-edge methods.