Real-Time Elimination of Undersampling Artifacts using 3D Total Variation on Graphics Hardware

Introduction Undersampled imaging strategies with cutting edge reconstruction methods like compressed sensing, which reformulate image reconstruction as a constrained optimization problem [1,2], have the potential to deliver images with high spatial and temporal resolution. This is of great importance for application like time resolved MR angiography, because the acquisition window is limited by the passage of the contrast agent. The major drawback of these algorithms is their long reconstruction time which makes it impossible to use them in clinical practice. It was shown recently that it is possible to use the massively parallel streaming processor architecture of modern graphic processing units (GPUs) to speed up image reconstruction for parallel imaging [3]. In this work, we show that optimization problems as encountered in compressed sensing can be solved on the GPU, with computation times that allow real time imaging.