Accelerated High-Resolution Imaging of Trabecular Bone Using Total Variation Constrained Reconstruction

Michael J. Wald¹, Ganesh Adluru¹, Hee Kwon Song¹, Felix W. Wehrli¹

High-resolution micro-MR imaging of trabecular bone is hampered by long scan times. Parallel imaging techniques offer a means to reduce scan times but the associated losses in SNR limit the achievable acceleration rates as structural parameters are sensitive to noise. Compressed sensing techniques take advantage of image sparsity to reconstruct alias-free images from undersampled data. Here we explore the application of Total Variation Constrained Reconstruction (TVCR) to trabecular bone imaging and compare the method in terms the derived topological parameters with a generalized partially-parallel acquisition-based reconstruction.