Diagnostic quality assessment of IR-prepared 3D magnetic resonance neuroimaging accelerated using compressed sensing and k-space sampling order optimization

Abstract Purpose To evaluate the clinical diagnostic efficacy of accelerated 3D magnetic resonance (MR) neuroimaging by radiological assessment for image quality and artefacts. Study type Prospective healthy volunteer study. Subjects Eight healthy subjects. Field strength/sequence Inversion Recovery (IR) prepared 3D Gradient Echo (GRE) sequence on a 1.5 T GE Signa HDx scanner. Assessment Independent radiological diagnostic quality assessments of accelerated 3D MR brain datasets were carried out by four experienced neuro-radiologists who were blinded to the acceleration factor and to the subject. The radiological grading was based on a previously reported radiological scoring key that was used for image quality assessment of human brains. Statistical tests Bland-Altman analysis. Results Optimization of the k-space sampling order was important for preserving contrast in accelerated scans. Despite having lower scores than fully sampled datasets, the majority of the compressed sensing (CS) accelerated brain datasets with k-space sampling order optimization (19/24 datasets by Radiologist 1, 24/24 datasets by Radiologist 2 and 16/24 datasets by Radiologist 3) were graded to be fully diagnostic indicating that there was adequate confidence for performing gross structural assessment of the brain. Conclusion Optimization of k-space acquisition order improves the clinical utility of CS accelerated 3D neuroimaging. This method may be appropriate for routine radiological assessment of the brain.