# ReconFormer: Accelerated MRI Reconstruction Using Recurrent Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.09376 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09376/

## Key facts

- Cited by 52 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Multiscale Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11227/) (2021)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [Understanding the Effective Receptive Field in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04128/) (2017)
- [Early Convolutions Help Transformers See Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14881/) (2021)
- [Score-based diffusion models for accelerated MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05243/) (2021)
- [Robust Compressed Sensing MRI with Deep Generative Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01368/) (2021)
- [A Deep Cascade of Convolutional Neural Networks for Dynamic MR Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02422/) (2017)
- [ViTAE: Vision Transformer Advanced by Exploring Intrinsic Inductive Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03348/) (2021)
- [Multi-Scale Vision Longformer: A New Vision Transformer for High-Resolution Image Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15358/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Variational Networks for Accelerated MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06688/) (2020)
- [ResViT: Residual vision transformers for multi-modal medical image synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.16031/) (2021)
- [Non-Local Recurrent Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02919/) (2018)
- [Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks for Dynamic MR Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01751/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised MRI Reconstruction via Zero-Shot Learned Adversarial Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08059/) (2021)
- [DuDoRNet: Learning a Dual-Domain Recurrent Network for Fast MRI Reconstruction with Deep T1 Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03799/) (2020)
- [Task Transformer Network for Joint MRI Reconstruction and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06742/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer for Fast MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03230/) (2022)
- [KiU-Net: Towards Accurate Segmentation of Biomedical Images using Over-complete Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04878/) (2020)
- [A Transfer-Learning Approach for Accelerated MRI using Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.02615/) (2017)
- [Multi-Modal Transformer for Accelerated MR Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14248/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning with Domain Adaptation for Accelerated Projection-Reconstruction MR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01135/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Adaptive Diffusion Priors for Accelerated MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05876/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Foundation Models in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10729/) (2024)
- [Transforming medical imaging with Transformers? A comparative review of key properties, current progresses, and future perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01136/) (2022)
- [Artificial General Intelligence for Medical Imaging Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05480/) (2023)
- [Transformers in Healthcare: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00067/) (2023)
- [MMR-Mamba: Multi-Modal MRI Reconstruction with Mamba and Spatial-Frequency Information Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18950/) (2024)
- [Learning Fourier-Constrained Diffusion Bridges for MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01096/) (2023)
- [Progressive Divide-and-Conquer via Subsampling Decomposition for Accelerated MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10064/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised Adversarial Diffusion Models for Fast MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15656/) (2024)
- [Physics-Driven Autoregressive State Space Models for Medical Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09331/) (2024)
- [MambaRecon: MRI Reconstruction with Structured State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12401/) (2024)
- [Lightweight Medical Image Restoration via Integrating Reliable Lesion-Semantic Driven Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11286/) (2025)
- [Noise Level Adaptive Diffusion Model for Robust Reconstruction of Accelerated MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05245/) (2024)
- [Boosting ViT-based MRI Reconstruction from the Perspectives of Frequency Modulation, Spatial Purification, and Scale Diversification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10776/) (2024)
- [Undersampled MRI Reconstruction with Side Information-Guided Normalisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03196/) (2022)
- [Highly Accelerated MRI via Implicit Neural Representation Guided Posterior Sampling of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02744/) (2024)
- [CL-MRI: Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning to Improve the Accuracy of Undersampled MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00530/) (2023)
- [MRPD: Undersampled MRI reconstruction by prompting a large latent diffusion model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10609/) (2024)
- [Score-based Generative Priors Guided Model-driven Network for MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02958/) (2024)
- [DH-Mamba: Exploring Dual-domain Hierarchical State Space Models for MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08163/) (2025)
- [Deep learning of personalized priors from past MRI scans enables fast, quality-enhanced point-of-care MRI with low-cost systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02470/) (2025)
- [HiFi-Mamba: Dual-Stream W-Laplacian Enhanced Mamba for High-Fidelity MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09179/) (2025)
- [MCU-Net: A Multi-prior Collaborative Deep Unfolding Network with Gates-controlled Spatial Attention for Accelerated MR Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03383/) (2024)
- [End-to-end Adaptive Dynamic Subsampling and Reconstruction for Cardiac MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10346/) (2024)
- [Accelerated Patient-specific Non-Cartesian MRI Reconstruction using Implicit Neural Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05051/) (2025)
- [Highly Undersampled MRI Reconstruction via a Single Posterior Sampling of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08142/) (2025)
- [Computationally Efficient 3D MRI Reconstruction with Adaptive MLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08868/) (2023)
- [A residual dense vision transformer for medical image super-resolution with segmentation-based perceptual loss fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11184/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Dual-Domain Undersampled MRI reconstruction: domain-specific design from the perspective of the receptive field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10611/) (2023)
- [DuDoUniNeXt: Dual-domain unified hybrid model for single and multi-contrast undersampled MRI reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05256/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accelerating magnetic resonance image (MRI) reconstruction process is a challenging ill-posed inverse problem due to the excessive under-sampling operation in k-space. In this paper, we propose a recurrent transformer model, namely ReconFormer, for MRI reconstruction which can iteratively reconstruct high fertility magnetic resonance images from highly under-sampled k-space data. In particular, the proposed architecture is built upon Recurrent Pyramid Transformer Layers (RPTL), which jointly exploits intrinsic multi-scale information at every architecture unit as well as the dependencies of the deep feature correlation through recurrent states. Moreover, the proposed ReconFormer is lightweight since it employs the recurrent structure for its parameter efficiency. We validate the effectiveness of ReconFormer on multiple datasets with different magnetic resonance sequences and show that it achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods with better parameter efficiency. Implementation code will be available in https://github.com/guopengf/ReconFormer.