Optimizing full 3D SPARKLING trajectories for high-resolution T2*-weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Understand

The Spreading Projection Algorithm for Rapid K-space samplING, or SPARKLING, is an optimization-driven method that has been recently introduced for accelerated 2D T2*-w MRI using compressed sensing.

• It has then been extended to address 3D imaging using either stacks of 2D sampling patterns or a local 3D strategy that optimizes a single sampling trajectory at a time.
• 2D SPARKLING actually performs variable density sampling (VDS) along a prescribed target density while maximizing sampling efficiency and meeting the gradient-based hardware constraints.
• However, 3D SPARKLING has remained limited in terms of acceleration factors along the third dimension if one wants to preserve a peaky point spread function (PSF) and thus good image quality.