A total variation regularization strategy in dynamic MRI

Abstract Recently, the application of Magnetic Resonance Imaging to the study of dynamic processes has increased the search of ever-faster dynamic imaging methods. The Keyhole method is a popular technique for fast dynamic imaging that unfortunately produces images affected by artifacts. In this work, we propose a Total Variation regularization strategy for post-processing the dynamic Keyhole images. The strategy consists in the solution of an unconstrained minimization problem whose Euler–Lagrange equation is solved by a quasi-Newton method. A trace of the algorithm is given. Results of numerical experiments on simulated and real data are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our experimental results indicate that the method reduces the degrading artifacts and improves the quality of the final images. Keywords: Total variationRegularizationDynamic MRI Acknowledgements The authors are grateful to an anonymous referee for carefully reading the manuscript and for many helpful comments and suggestions. This work was supported by the Italian Education, University and Research Ministry (grant FIRB2001/RBAU01JYPN, grant MIUR2002/2002013422).