HYPR : Constrained reconstruction for enhanced SNR in dynamic medical imaging

During the last eight years our group has developed radial acquisitions with angular undersampling factors of several hundred that accelerate MRI in selected applications. As with all previous acceleration techniques, SNR typically falls as least as fast as the inverse square root of the undersampling factor. This limits the SNR available to support the small voxels that these methods can image over short time intervals in applications like time-resolved contrast-enhanced MR angiography (CE-MRA). Instead of processing each time interval independently, we have developed constrained reconstruction methods that exploit the significant correlation between temporal sampling points. A broad class of methods, termed HighlY Constrained Back PRojection (HYPR), generalizes this concept to other modalities and sampling dimensions.