Compressed Sensing Multi-Spectral Imaging of the Post-Operative Spine

Pauline Wong Worters¹, Kyunghyun Sung¹, Kathryn J. Stevens¹, Kevin M. Koch², Brian A. Hargreaves¹

Multi-spectral imaging (MSI) methods such as MAVRIC, SEMAC and Hybrid have been developed in recent years to provide distortion-free MRI of tissue around metallic implants. However, acquisition times remain lengthy (5-15 minutes) and limit the achievable spatial resolution in routine clinical use. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of using compressed sensing (CS) to reduce acquisition time in a retrospective application to patient data with spinal hardware. Results show that retrospective CS-MSI are the same as or better than the original MSI images. We also show that fully sampled MSI and prospectively undersampled T2-weighted CS-MSI (42% scan time reduction) are comparable in terms of image contrast and quality.