MRI Recovery with Self-Calibrated Denoisers without Fully-Sampled Data

PURPOSE: To present and validate a self-supervised MRI reconstruction method that does not require fully sampled k-space data. METHODS: ReSiDe is inspired by plug-and-play (PnP) methods and employs a denoiser as a regularizer. In contrast to traditional PnP approaches that utilize generic denoisers or train deep learning-based denoisers using high-quality images or image patches, ReSiDe directly trains the denoiser on the image or images being reconstructed from the undersampled data. We introduce two variations of our method, ReSiDe-S and ReSiDe-M. ReSiDe-S is scan-specific and works with a single set of undersampled measurements, while ReSiDe-M operates on multiple sets of undersampled measurements. More importantly, the trained denoisers in ReSiDe-M are stored for PnP recovery without further training. To improve robustness, the denoising strength in ReSiDe-S and ReSiDe- M is auto-tuned using the discrepancy principle. RESULTS: Studies I, II, and III compare ReSiDe-S and ReSiDe-M against other self-supervised or unsupervised methods using data from T1- and T2-weighted brain MRI, MRXCAT digital perfusion phantom, and first-pass cardiac perfusion, respectively. ReSiDe-S and ReSiDe-M outperform other methods in terms of reconstruction signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity index measure for Studies I and II and in terms of expert scoring for Study III. CONCLUSION: A self-supervised image reconstruction method is presented and validated in both static and dynamic MRI applications. These developments can benefit MRI applications where availability of fully sampled training data is limited.