# No Image, No Problem: End-to-End Multi-Task Cardiac Analysis from Undersampled k-Space

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09945 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09945/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [A Deep Cascade of Convolutional Neural Networks for Dynamic MR Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02422/) (2017)
- [Image reconstruction by domain transform manifold learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08841/) (2017)
- [Deep learning for cardiac image segmentation: A review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03723/) (2019)
- [Self Pre-training with Masked Autoencoders for Medical Image Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05573/) (2022)
- [OCMR (v1.0)--Open-Access Multi-Coil k-Space Dataset for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03410/) (2020)
- [Similarity and Quality Metrics for MR Image-To-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08431/) (2024)
- [Towards Cardiac MRI Foundation Models: Comprehensive Visual-Tabular Representations for Whole-Heart Assessment and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13037/) (2025)
- [Adversarial and Perceptual Refinement for Compressed Sensing MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.11216/) (2018)
- [Whole Heart 3D+T Representation Learning Through Sparse 2D Cardiac MR Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00329/) (2024)
- [Global k-Space Interpolation for Dynamic MRI Reconstruction using Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12672/) (2023)
- [Classification, Regression and Segmentation directly from k-Space in Cardiac MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20108/) (2024)
- [Direct Cardiac Segmentation from Undersampled K-space Using Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00192/) (2024)
- [Subspace Implicit Neural Representations for Real-Time Cardiac Cine MR Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12742/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conventional clinical CMR pipelines rely on a sequential "reconstruct-then-analyze" paradigm, forcing an ill-posed intermediate step that introduces avoidable artifacts and information bottlenecks. This creates a fundamental mathematical paradox: it attempts to recover high-dimensional pixel arrays (i.e., images) from undersampled k-space, rather than directly extracting the low-dimensional physiological labels actually required for diagnosis. To unlock the direct diagnostic potential of k-space, we propose k-MTR (k-space Multi-Task Representation), a k-space representation learning framework that aligns undersampled k-space data and fully-sampled images into a shared semantic manifold. Leveraging a large-scale controlled simulation of 42,000 subjects, k-MTR forces the k-space encoder to restore anatomical information lost to undersampling directly within the latent space, bypassing the explicit inverse problem for downstream analysis. We demonstrate that this latent alignment enables the dense latent space embedded with high-level physiological semantics directly from undersampled frequencies. Across continuous phenotype regression, disease classification, and anatomical segmentation, k-MTR achieves highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art image-domain baselines. By showcasing that precise spatial geometries and multi-task features can be successfully recovered directly from the k-space representations, k-MTR provides a robust architectural blueprint for task-aware cardiac MRI workflows.