Abstract: Recently, dictionary learning (DL) based methods have been introduced to compressed sensing magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI), which outperforms pre-defined analytic sparse priors. However, single-scale trained dictionary directly from image patches is incapable of representing image features from multi-scale, multi-directional perspective, which influences the reconstruction performance. In this paper, incorporating the superior multi-scale properties of uniform discrete curvelet transform (UDCT) with the data matching adaptability of trained dictionaries, we propose a flexible sparsity framework to allow sparser representation and prominent hierarchical essential features capture for magnetic resonance (MR) images. Multi-scale decomposition is implemented by using UDCT due to its prominent properties of lower redundancy ratio, hierarchical data structure, and ease of implementation. Each sub-dictionary of different sub-bands is trained independently to form the multi-scale dictionaries. Corresponding to this brand-new sparsity model, we modify the constraint splitting augmented Lagrangian shrinkage algorithm (C-SALSA) as patch-based C-SALSA (PB C-SALSA) to solve the constraint optimization problem of regularized image reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that the trained sub-dictionaries at different scales, enforcing sparsity at multiple scales, can then be efficiently used for MRI reconstruction to obtain satisfactory results with further reduced undersampling rate. Multi-scale UDCT dictionaries potentially outperform both single-scale trained dictionaries and multi-scale analytic transforms. Our proposed sparsity model achieves sparser representation for reconstructed data, which results in fast convergence of reconstruction exploiting PB C-SALSA. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms conventional CS-MRI methods in maintaining intrinsic properties, eliminating aliasing, reducing unexpected artifacts, and removing noise. It can achieve comparable performance of reconstruction with the state-of-the-art methods even under substantially high undersampling factors.

Key words: Compressed sensing (CS), Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), Uniform discrete curvelet transform (UDCT), Multi-scale dictionary learning (MSDL), Patch-based constraint splitting augmented Lagrangian shrinkage algorithm (PB C-SALSA)

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