Calibrationless Parallel Imaging in Multi Echo/Contrast Data

Parallel imaging relies on fully-sampled calibration data to estimate k-space kernels or sensitivities used to reconstruct subsampled acquisitions. Emerging techniques use low-rank modeling, or joint estimation of sensitivities and image content via nonlinear optimization, to reduce the dependency on calibration data. In a typical study, images at multiple echoes/contrasts are acquired using the same coil sensitivities. Here, we exploit this joint information to dramatically improve conditioning of calibrationless nonlinear inversion and employ joint sparsity to improve reconstruction. To achieve better performance, we also propose complementary k-space undersampling between images to form a composite image with reduced aliasing to initialize the optimization.