Reference-Driven Undersampled MR Image Reconstruction Using Wavelet Sparsity-Constrained Deep Image Prior

Deep learning has shown potential in significantly improving performance for undersampled magnetic resonance (MR) image reconstruction. However, one challenge for the application of deep learning to clinical scenarios is the requirement of large, high-quality patient-based datasets for network training. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based method for undersampled MR image reconstruction that does not require pre-training procedure and pre-training datasets. The proposed reference-driven method using wavelet sparsity-constrained deep image prior (RWS-DIP) is based on the DIP framework and thereby reduces the dependence on datasets. Moreover, RWS-DIP explores and introduces structure and sparsity priors into network learning to improve the efficiency of learning. By employing a high-resolution reference image as the network input, RWS-DIP incorporates structural information into network. RWS-DIP also uses the wavelet sparsity to further enrich the implicit regularization of traditional DIP by formulating the training of network parameters as a constrained optimization problem, which is solved using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm. Experiments on in vivo MR scans have demonstrated that the RWS-DIP method can reconstruct MR images more accurately and preserve features and textures from undersampled k-space measurements.