Real-time Cardiovascular MR with Spatio-temporal Artifact Suppression using Deep Learning - Proof of Concept in Congenital Heart Disease

PURPOSE: Real-time assessment of ventricular volumes requires high acceleration factors. Residual convolutional neural networks (CNN) have shown potential for removing artifacts caused by data undersampling. In this study we investigated the effect of different radial sampling patterns on the accuracy of a CNN. We also acquired actual real-time undersampled radial data in patients with congenital heart disease (CHD), and compare CNN reconstruction to Compressed Sensing (CS). METHODS: A 3D (2D plus time) CNN architecture was developed, and trained using 2276 gold-standard paired 3D data sets, with 14x radial undersampling. Four sampling schemes were tested, using 169 previously unseen 3D 'synthetic' test data sets. Actual real-time tiny Golden Angle (tGA) radial SSFP data was acquired in 10 new patients (122 3D data sets), and reconstructed using the 3D CNN as well as a CS algorithm; GRASP. RESULTS: Sampling pattern was shown to be important for image quality, and accurate visualisation of cardiac structures. For actual real-time data, overall reconstruction time with CNN (including creation of aliased images) was shown to be more than 5x faster than GRASP. Additionally, CNN image quality and accuracy of biventricular volumes was observed to be superior to GRASP for the same raw data. CONCLUSION: This paper has demonstrated the potential for the use of a 3D CNN for deep de-aliasing of real-time radial data, within the clinical setting. Clinical measures of ventricular volumes using real-time data with CNN reconstruction are not statistically significantly different from the gold-standard, cardiac gated, BH techniques.