PARCEL: Physics-based unsupervised contrastive representation learning for parallel MR imaging
With the successful application of deep learning in magnetic resonance imaging, parallel imaging techniques based on neural networks have attracted wide attentions. However, without high-quality fully sampled datasets for training, the performance of these methods tends to be limited. To address this issue, this paper proposes a physics based unsupervised contrastive representation learning (PARCEL) method to speed up parallel MR imaging. Specifically, PARCEL has three key ingredients to achieve direct deep learning from the undersampled k-space data. Namely, a parallel framework has been developed by learning two branches of model-based networks unrolled with the conjugate gradient algorithm; Augmented undersampled k-space data randomly drawn from the obtained k-space data are used to help the parallel network to capture the detailed information. A specially designed co-training loss is designed to guide the two networks to capture the inherent features and representations of the-to-be-reconstructed MR image. The proposed method has been evaluated on in vivo datasets and compared to five state-of-the-art methods, whose results show PARCEL is able to learn useful representations for more accurate MR reconstructions without the reliance on the fully-sampled datasets.
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