Fast Dynamic Perfusion and Angiography Reconstruction using an end-to-end 3D Convolutional Neural Network

Hadamard time-encoded pseudo-continuous arterial spin labeling (te-pCASL) is a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)-efficient MRI technique for acquiring dynamic pCASL signals that encodes the temporal information into the labeling according to a Hadamard matrix. In the decoding step, the contribution of each sub-bolus can be isolated resulting in dynamic perfusion scans. When acquiring te-ASL both with and without flow-crushing, the ASL-signal in the arteries can be isolated resulting in 4D-angiographic information. However, obtaining multi-timepoint perfusion and angiographic data requires two acquisitions. In this study, we propose a 3D Dense-Unet convolutional neural network with a multi-level loss function for reconstructing multi-timepoint perfusion and angiographic information from an interleaved 50%-sampled crushed and 50%-sampled non-crushed data, thereby negating the additional scan time. We present a framework to generate dynamic pCASL training and validation data, based on models of the intravascular and extravascular te-pCASL signals. The proposed network achieved SSIM values of 97.3 ± 1.1 and 96.2 ± 11.1 respectively for 4D perfusion and angiographic data reconstruction for 313 test data-sets.