Three dimension double inversion recovery gray matter imaging using compressed sensing

The double inversion recovery (DIR) imaging technique has various applications such as black blood magnetic resonance imaging and gray/white matter imaging. Recent clinical studies show the promise of DIR for high resolution three dimensional (3D) gray matter imaging. One drawback in this case however is the long data acquisition time needed to obtain the fully sampled 3D spatial frequency domain (k-space) data. In this paper, we propose a method to solve this problem using the compressed sensing (CS) algorithm with contourlet transform. The contourlet transform is an effective sparsifying transform especially for images with smooth contours. Therefore, we applied this algorithm to undersampled DIR images and compared with a CS algorithm using wavelet transform by evaluating the reconstruction performance of each algorithm for undersampled k-space data. The results show that the proposed CS algorithm achieves a more accurate reconstruction in terms of the mean structural similarity index and root mean square error than the CS algorithm using wavelet transform.