Low-Rank and Sparse Matrix Decomposition for Accelerated DCE-MRI with Background and Contrast Separation

Ricardo Otazo1, Emmanuel Cands2, Daniel K. Sodickson1

1
Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, NYU School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA
2
Department of Mathematics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
INTRODUCTION: High spatial and temporal correlations in dynamic MRI data sets enabled the application of compressed sensing
[1-2] and low-rank matrix completion [3-4] to accelerate data acquisition. The combination of both techniques is very attractive to
increase the acceleration rate. Recently, a new matrix decomposition method consisting of a superposition of a low-rank matrix (L)
and sparse matrix (S) has been proposed to perform robust principal component analysis, e.g. to recover the principal components of a
data matrix with corrupted or missing entries [5]. The L+S decomposition appears to be particularly suitable for dynamic contrastenhanced (DCE) MRI, where the low-rank component can model the background and the sparse component can model the dynamic
contrast enhancement. In this work, we present the application of the L+S decomposition to reconstruct undersampled DCE-MRI data
with separation of the background and contrast enhancement and its implementation using the TFOCS toolbox [6].
THEORY: The L+S approach aims to find the low-rank (L) and sparse (S) components of a matrix M with linearly dependent rows or
columns by solving the following optimization problem: min + 1 subject to = + , where is the nuclear norm or
sum of singular values of the matrix L and 1 is the l1-norm or sum of absolute values of the entries of S. In order to apply this idea
to dynamic MRI, the time-series of images x-y-t can be reorganized into a matrix M of dimensions NxNyxNt, where each column is an
image frame. This matrix has low-rank and can be sparsified using a transform T along the columns. The L+S reconstruction of
undersampled dynamic MRI data can be formulated as follows: min + 1 s. t. ( + ) = , where T is the sparsifying
transform, E is the acquisition matrix and d is the undersampled k-t data. The reconstruction result is given by M=L+S.

METHODS: The feasibility of the method was tested by retrospectively undersampling a cardiac perfusion data set, which presents
contrast-enhancement as dynamic information. 2D cardiac perfusion MRI was performed on a 3T Siemens Trio scanner using a
standard 12-element body matrix coil array. Fully-sampled perfusion data were acquired using a 128128 matrix (FOV = 320320
mm2) and 40 temporal frames and retrospectively undersampled by a factor of 8 using a different variable-density random
undersampling along ky for each time point, to exploit spatial and temporal incoherence [1-2]. The L+S reconstruction was
implemented in Matlab using the TFOCS toolbox [7] by solving the following optimization problem:
minL* + ST1 s.t. E(L+S)-d2 <,where T is the temporal FFT (sparsifying transform for S), is a weighting parameter
determined empirically by comparing the performance of several values, E is the multicoil SENSE matrix given by the product of
spatial Fourier transform for each time point according to the undersampling pattern and the coil sensitivities, and is a data fidelity
parameter, which was set to the noise level. The algorithm enforces joint multicoil low-rank and sparsity by using the multicoil
SENSE matrix, which increases performance by combining compressed sensing and parallel imaging into a single joint reconstruction
[2]. For comparison purposes, a standard multicoil compressed sensing (CS) reconstruction was also implemented using TFOCS by
2

solving minEM-d2 + MT1 .

RESULTS: Fig. 1 shows the reconstruction of

the 8-fold undersampled cardiac perfusion
data set. The L+S method separated the
background component from the contrastenhancement component. The estimated
background is not constant for all the frames,
but is highly correlated among frames. The
RMSE with respect to the fully-sampled data
was 18.7% and 9.6% for CS and L+S
respectively. L+S presented lower residual
aliasing artifacts and signal leakage from other
frames than CS, which resulted in improved
depiction of the myocardial wall contrast Fig. 1: Reconstruction of the 8-fold undersampled cardiac perfusion data set using
enhancement.
standard compressed sensing (CS) and the proposed low-rank + sparsity
DISCUSSION:
The
L+S
technique decomposition (L+S) for blood and myocardial wall enhancement phases. Note the
suppresses the background before enforcing separation of the background (grey) and contrast enhancement.
sparsity, which effectively increases sparsity
(M-L is more sparse than M) and thus improves reconstruction performance. In addition to increasing the acceleration capability of
dynamic MRI in general, the separation of background and dynamic components without the need of modeling the background may
be particularly useful for studies that require background suppression, such as contrast-enhanced angiography.
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3:165218 (www.cvxr.com/tfocs).