CEST is a new contrast mechanism in MRI. However, a successful application of CEST is hampered by its slow acquisition. This work investigates accelerating CEST imaging using parallel convolutional neural networks (PCNN). We extend the Cascade-CNN into a multi-channel model and train the network establish a mapping from the multi-coil input to multi-coil output. This work is the first try to apply deep learning and convolutional neural networks technique in accelerating CEST imaging. The in vivo brain results show that the proposed method demonstrates a high quality reconstruction of the MTRasym maps with different saturation pulses at R=4.
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