Benchmarking 3D multi-coil NC-PDNet MRI reconstruction

Deep learning has shown great promise for MRI reconstruction from undersampled data, yet there is a lack of research on validating its performance in 3D parallel imaging acquisitions with non-Cartesian undersampling. In addition, the artifacts and the resulting image quality depend on the under-sampling pattern. To address this uncharted territory, we extend the Non-Cartesian Primal-Dual Network (NC-PDNet), a state-of-the-art unrolled neural network, to a 3D multi-coil setting. We evaluated the impact of channel-specific versus channel-agnostic training configurations and examined the effect of coil compression. Finally, we benchmark four distinct non-Cartesian undersampling patterns, with an acceleration factor of six, using the publicly available Calgary-Campinas dataset. Our results show that NC-PDNet trained on compressed data with varying input channel numbers achieves an average PSNR of 42.98 dB for 1 mm isotropic 32 channel whole-brain 3D reconstruction. With an inference time of 4.95sec and a GPU memory usage of 5.49 GB, our approach demonstrates significant potential for clinical research application.