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Purpose Advanced MRI-based biomarkers offer comprehensive and quantitative information for the evaluation and characterization of brain tumors. In this study, we report initial clinical experience in routine glioma imaging with a novel, fully 3D multiparametric quantitative transient-state imaging (QTI) method for tissue characterization based on T1 and T2 values. Methods To demonstrate the viability of the proposed 3D QTI technique, nine glioma patients (grade II–IV), with a variety of disease states and treatment histories, were included in this study. First, we investigated the feasibility of 3D QTI (6:25 min scan time) for its use in clinical routine imaging, focusing on image reconstruction, parameter estimation, and contrast-weighted image synthesis. Second, for an initial assessment of 3D QTI-based quantitative MR biomarkers, we performed a ROI-based analysis to characterize T1 and T2 components in tumor and peritumoral tissue. Results The 3D acquisition combined with a compressed sensing reconstruction and neural network-based parameter inference produced parametric maps with high isotropic resolution (1.125 × 1.125 × 1.125 mm3 voxel size) and whole-brain coverage (22.5 × 22.5 × 22.5 cm3 FOV), enabling the synthesis of clinically relevant T1-weighted, T2-weighted, and FLAIR contrasts without any extra scan time. Our study revealed increased T1 and T2 values in tumor and peritumoral regions compared to contralateral white matter, good agreement with healthy volunteer data, and high inter-subject consistency. Conclusion 3D QTI demonstrated comprehensive tissue assessment of tumor substructures captured in T1 and T2 parameters. Aiming for fast acquisition of quantitative MR biomarkers, 3D QTI has potential to improve disease characterization in brain tumor patients under tight clinical time-constraints.

Novel methods for quantitative, transient-state multiparametric imaging are increasingly being demonstrated for assessment of disease and treatment efficacy. Here, we build on these by assessing the most common Non-Cartesian readout trajectories (2D/3D radials and spirals), demonstrating efficient anti-aliasing with a k-space view-sharing technique, and proposing novel methods for parameter inference with neural networks that incorporate the estimation of proton density. Our results show good agreement with gold standard and phantom references for all readout trajectories at 1.5T and 3T. Parameters inferred with the neural network were within 6.58% difference from the parameters inferred with a high-resolution dictionary. Concordance correlation coefficients were above 0.92 and the normalized root mean squared error ranged between 4.2% - 12.7% with respect to gold-standard phantom references for T1 and T2. In vivo acquisitions demonstrate sub-millimetric isotropic resolution in under five minutes with reconstruction and inference times < 7 minutes. Our 3D quantitative transient-state imaging approach could enable high-resolution multiparametric tissue quantification within clinically acceptable acquisition and reconstruction times., 43 pages, 12 Figures, 5 Tables

Consistency of the predictions with respect to the physical forward model is pivotal for reliably solving inverse problems. This consistency is mostly un-controlled in the current end-to-end deep learning methodologies proposed for the Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF) problem. To address this, we propose PGD-Net, a learned proximal gradient descent framework that directly incorporates the forward acquisition and Bloch dynamic models within a recurrent learning mechanism. The PGD-Net adopts a compact neural proximal model for de-aliasing and quantitative inference, that can be flexibly trained on scarce MRF training datasets. Our numerical experiments show that the PGD-Net can achieve a superior quantitative inference accuracy, much smaller storage requirement, and a comparable runtime to the recent deep learning MRF baselines, while being much faster than the dictionary matching schemes. Code has been released at https://github.com/edongdongchen/PGD-Net.

Current popular methods for Magnetic Resonance Fingerprint (MRF) recovery are bottlenecked by the heavy storage and computation requirements of a dictionary-matching (DM) step due to the growing size and complexity of the fingerprint dictionaries in multi-parametric quantitative MRI applications. In this paper we study a deep learning approach to address these shortcomings. Coupled with a dimensionality reduction first layer, the proposed MRF-Net is able to reconstruct quantitative maps by saving more than 60 times in memory and computations required for a DM baseline. Fine-grid manifold enumeration i.e. the MRF dictionary is only used for training the network and not during image reconstruction. We show that the MRF-Net provides a piece-wise affine approximation to the Bloch response manifold projection and that rather than memorizing the dictionary, the network efficiently clusters this manifold and learns a set of hierarchical matched-filters for affine regression of the NMR characteristics in each segment.

Purpose: To develop an accelerated Cartesian MRF implementation using a multi-shot EPI sequence for rapid simultaneous quantification of T1 and T2 parameters. Methods: The proposed Cartesian MRF method involved the acquisition of highly subsampled MR images using a 16-shot EPI readout. A linearly varying flip angle train was used for rapid, simultaneous T1 and T2 quantification. The accuracy of parametric map estimations were improved by using an iterative projection algorithm. The results were compared to a conventional spiral MRF implementation. The acquisition time per slice was 8s and this method was validated on a phantom and a healthy volunteer brain in vivo. Results: Joint T1 and T2 estimations using the 16-shot EPI readout are in good agreement with the spiral implementation using the same acquisition parameters (deviation less than 3% for T1 and less than 4% for T2) for the healthy volunteer brain. The T1 and T2 values also agree with the conventional values previously reported in the literature. The visual quality of the multi-parametric maps generated by the multi-shot EPI-MRF and spiral-MRF implementations were comparable. Conclusion: The multi-shot EPI-MRF method generated accurate quantitative multi-parametric maps similar to conventional Spiral - MRF. This multi-shot approach achieved provides an alternative for performing MRF using an accelerated Cartesian readout, thereby increasing the potential usability of MRF., Comment: 12 pages, 11 main figures, 2 supplementry figures, preprint of accepted abstract

Sensor selection refers to the problem of intelligently selecting a small subset of a collection of available sensors to reduce the sensing cost while preserving signal acquisition performance. The majority of sensor selection algorithms find the subset of sensors that best recovers an arbitrary signal from a number of linear measurements that is larger than the dimension of the signal. In this paper, we develop a new sensor selection algorithm for sparse (or near sparse) signals that finds a subset of sensors that best recovers such signals from a number of measurements that is much smaller than the dimension of the signal. Existing sensor selection algorithms cannot be applied in such situations. Our proposed Incoherent Sensor Selection (Insense) algorithm minimizes a coherence-based cost function that is adapted from recent results in sparse recovery theory. Using six datasets, including two real-world datasets on microbial diagnostics and structural health monitoring, we demonstrate the superior performance of Insense for sparse-signal sensor selection.

Detecting and tracking people in scenes monitored by cameras is an important step in many application scenarios such as surveillance, urban planning or behavioral studies to name a few. The amount of data produced by camera feeds is so large that it is also vital that these steps be performed with the utmost computational efficiency and often even real-time. We propose SCOOP, a novel algorithm that reliably detects pedestrians in camera feeds, using only the output of a simple background removal technique. SCOOP can handle a single or many video feeds. At the heart of our technique there is a sparse model for binary motion detection maps that we solve with a novel greedy algorithm based on set covering. We study the convergence and performance of the algorithm under various degradation models such as noisy observations and crowded environments, and we provide mathematical and experimental evidence of both its efficiency and robustness using standard datasets. This clearly shows that SCOOP is a viable alternative to existing state-of-the-art people detection algorithms, with the marked advantage of real-time computations.

We tackle the speech separation problem through modeling the acoustics of the reverberant chambers. Our approach exploits structured sparsity models to perform speech recovery and room acoustic modeling from recordings of concurrent unknown sources. The speakers are assumed to lie on a two-dimensional plane and the multipath channel is characterized using the image model. We propose an algorithm for room geometry estimation relying on localization of the early images of the speakers by sparse approximation of the spatial spectrum of the virtual sources in a free-space model. The images are then clustered exploiting the low-rank structure of the spectro-temporal components belonging to each source. This enables us to identify the early support of the room impulse response function and its unique map to the room geometry. To further tackle the ambiguity of the reflection ratios, we propose a novel formulation of the reverberation model and estimate the absorption coefficients through a convex optimization exploiting joint sparsity model formulated upon spatio-spectral sparsity of concurrent speech representation. The acoustic parameters are then incorporated for separating individual speech signals through either structured sparse recovery or inverse filtering the acoustic channels. The experiments conducted on real data recordings of spatially stationary sources demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for speech separation and recognition.

This paper presents a novel approach to capture light field in camera arrays based on the compressive sensing framework. Light fields are captured by a linear array of cameras with overlapping field of view. In this work, we design a redundant dictionary to exploit cross-cameras correlated structures to sparsely represent cameras image. Our main contributions are threefold. First, we exploit the correlations between the set of views by making use of a specially designed redundant dictionary. We show experimentally that the projection of complex scenes onto this dictionary yields very sparse coefficients. Second, we propose an efficient compressive encoding scheme based on the random convolution framework [1]. Finally, we develop a joint sparse recovery algorithm for decoding the compressed measurements and show a marked improvement over independent decoding of CS measurements.

In this paper we propose a novel and efficient model for compressed sensing of hyperspectral images. A large-size hyperspectral image can be subsampled by retaining only 3\% of its original size, yet robustly recovered using the new approach we present here. Our reconstruction approach is based on minimizing a convex functional which penalizes both the trace norm and the TV norm of the data matrix. Thus, the solution tends to have a simultaneous low-rank and piecewise smooth structure: the two important priors explaining the underlying correlation structure of such data. Through simulations we will show our approach significantly enhances the conventional compression rate-distortion tradeoffs. In particular, in the strong undersampling regimes our method outperforms the standard TV denoising image recovery scheme by more than 17dB in the reconstruction MSE.

This paper analyzes the performance of the simple thresholding algorithm for sparse signal representations. In particular, in order to be more realistic we introduce a new probabilistic signal model which assumes randomness for both the amplitude and also the location of nonzero entries. Based on this model we show that thresholding in average can correctly recover signals for much higher sparsity levels than was previously reported. The bounds we obtain in this paper are based on a new concept of average dictionary coherence and are shown to be much sharper than in former works [1,2].

We propose a novel approach to reconstruct Hyperspectral images from very few number of noisy compressive measure- ments. Our reconstruction approach is based on a convex minimiza- tion which penalizes both the nuclear norm and the l2,1 mixed-norm of the data matrix. Thus, the solution tends to have a simultane- ously low-rank and joint-sparse structure. We explain how these two assumptions fit the Hyperspectral data, and by severals simulations we show that our proposed reconstruction scheme significantly enhances the state-of-the-art tradeoffs between the reconstruction error and the required number of CS measurements.

This paper describes a novel framework for compressive sampling (CS) of multichannel signals that are highly dependent across the channels. In this work, we assume few number of sources are generating the multichannel observations based on a linear mixture model. Moreover, sources are assumed to have sparse/compressible representations in some orthonormal basis. The main contribution of this paper lies in 1) rephrasing the CS acquisition of multichannel data as a compressive blind source separation problem, and 2) proposing an optimization problem and a recovery algorithm to estimate both the sources and the mixing matrix (and thus the whole data) from the compressed measurements. A number of experiments on the acquisition of Hyperspectral images show that our proposed algorithm obtains a reconstruction error between 10 dB and 15 dB less than other state-of-the-art CS methods.

Distributed compressed sensing is the extension of compressed sampling (CS) to sensor networks. The idea is to design a CS joint decoding scheme at a central decoder (base station) that exploits the inter-sensor correlations, in order to recover the whole observations from very few number of random measurements per node. In this paper, we focus on modeling the correlations and on the design and analysis of efficient joint recovery algorithms. We show, by extending earlier results of Baron et al.,1 that a simple thresholding algorithm can exploit the full diversity offered by all channels to identify a common sparse support using a near optimal number of measurements.