Compressive, Rapid Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Magnetic Resonance Imaging is a non-invasive, non-toxic imaging modality. Since its introduction over 30 years ago it has revolutionized diagnostic medicine. Imaging speed is important in many MRI applications, however the speed in which data is collected is fundamentally limited by physical and physiological constraints. At the same time, MRI images in general, and dynamic MRI images in particular, are often highly compressible. In addition, MRI data are collected in the spatial frequency domain, not as pixels in the image domain. MR provides considerable flexibility in choosing sampling patterns, which enables incoherent sampling. As a result, MRI is a natural Compressed Sensing hardware system. MRI scans can be significantly accelerated by obtaining fewer samples and exploiting the compressibility of the underlying images for reconstruction.