Accelerated 3D Carotid Vessel Wall Imaging Using Compressed Sensing

Mahender K. Makhijani¹, Krishna S. Nayak¹

Multi-contrast high-resolution imaging is used to characterize carotid plaque components. 3D acquisitions are gaining acceptance but are susceptible to artifacts from swallowing during long scans. We investigate the acceleration of 3D inner volume Fast Spin-Echo imaging of the carotid wall using compressive sensing (CS). We examine the effect of CS reconstruction penalties and the sparsifying transform on image quality. We demonstrate repeatable artifact free reconstruction with up to 4x under-sampling, by using Total Variation and symmetric wavelets as the sparsifying transforms.