Compressed sensing with non-uniform fast fourier transform for radial Ultra-short Echo Time (UTE) MRI

This paper proposes a compressive sensing (CS) method for radial Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) using nonuniform fast fourier transform (NUFFT). With the Ultra-short Echo Time (UTE) technology, radial MRI can reduce scan time, reduce artifacts, and achieve high imaging quality. We show that NUFFT-CS reconstruction from under-sampled radial k-space measurements achieves better image quality than the zero-filling (ZF) approaches and the existing CS approach that uses regridding. Experiments using phantom and animal samples have verified that the NUFFT-CS achieves better performance than the NUFFT-ZF, regrid-ZF, and regrid-CS, especially at small sampling rates.