Application of partial-echo compressed sensing in MR angiography

Magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) has significant clinical applications in the diagnosis of brain diseases related to arteries vasculature. It is often performed as a three dimensional data acquisition and, therefore, long scan time is typicall required. Recently, compressed sensing holds considerable promise to accelerate MRI data acquisition by exploiting signal sparsity. In this study, partial echo compressed sensing (PECS) method is investigated to reduce the MRA data acquisition time. Partial echo combined with random undersampling along phase encoding directions is proposed to acquire MRA data, projection onto convex set (POCS) combined with soft thresholding is used to approximate the undersampled k-space data, followed by a nonlinear reconstruction to further improve the image quality. The results show that PECS method can achieve reasonably high quality MRA reconstruction using only a small fractional k-space coverage.