Accelerated parameter mapping with compressed sensing: an alternative to MR fingerprinting

We introduce a method for MR parameter mapping based on three concepts: 1) an inversion recovery, variable flip angle acquisition strategy designed for speed, signal, and contrast; 2) a compressed sensing reconstruction which exploits spatiotemporal correlations through low rank regularization; and 3) a model-based optimization to simultaneously estimate proton density, T1, and T2 values from the acquired measurements. Compared to MR Fingerprinting, the proposed method achieves a five-fold acceleration in acquisition time, reconstructs an unaliased series of images, and does not rely on dictionary matching for parameter estimation.