Introduction to Parallelizing Compressed Sensing Magnetic Resonance Imaging

We present `1-SPIRiT, a simple algorithm for auto calibrating parallel imaging (acPI) and compressed sensing (CS) that permits an efficient implementation with clinically-feasible runtimes. We propose a CS objective function that minimizes cross-channel joint sparsity in the Wavelet domain. Our reconstruction minimizes this objective via iterative soft-thresholding, and integrates naturally with iterative Self-Consistent Parallel Imaging (SPIRiT). Like many iterative MRI reconstructions, `1-SPIRiT’s image quality comes at a high computational cost. Excessively long runtimes are a barrier to the clinical use of any reconstruction approach, and thus we discuss our approach to efficiently parallelizing `1-SPIRiT and to achieving clinically-feasible runtimes. We present parallelizations of `1-SPIRiT for both multi-GPU systems and multi-core CPUs, and discuss the software optimization and parallelization decisions made in our implementation. The performance of these alternatives depends on the processor architecture, the size of the image matrix, and the number of parallel imaging channels. Fundamentally, achieving fast runtime requires the correct trade-off between cache usage and parallelization overheads. We demonstrate image quality via a case from our clinical experimentation, using a custom 3DFT Spoiled Gradient Echo (SPGR) sequence with up to 8× acceleration via Poisson-disc undersampling in the two phase-encoded directions.