Multi‐band‐ and in‐plane‐accelerated diffusion MRI enabled by model‐based deep learning in q‐space and its extension to learning in the spherical harmonic domain

PURPOSE: To propose a new method for the recovery of combined in-plane- and multi-band (MB)-accelerated diffusion MRI data. METHODS: Combining MB acceleration with in-plane acceleration is crucial to improve the time efficiency of high (angular and spatial) resolution diffusion scans. However, as the MB factor and in-plane acceleration increase, the reconstruction becomes challenging due to the heavy aliasing. The new reconstruction utilizes an additional q-space prior to constrain the recovery, which is derived from the previously proposed qModeL framework. Specifically, the qModeL prior provides a pre-learned representation of the diffusion signal space to which the measured data belongs. We show that the pre-learned q-space prior along with a model-based iterative reconstruction that accommodate multi-band unaliasing, can efficiently reconstruct the in-plane- and MB-accelerated data. The power of joint reconstruction is maximally utilized by using an incoherent under-sampling pattern in the k-q domain. We tested the proposed method on single- and multi-shell data, with high/low angular resolution, high/low spatial resolution, healthy/abnormal tissues, and 3T/7T field strengths. Furthermore, the learning is extended to the spherical harmonic basis, to provide a rotational invariant learning framework. RESULTS: The qModeL joint reconstruction is shown to simultaneously unalias and jointly recover DWIs with reasonable accuracy in all the cases studied. The reconstruction error from 18-fold accelerated multi-shell datasets was <3%. The microstructural maps derived from the accelerated acquisitions also exhibit reasonable accuracy for both healthy and abnormal tissues. The deep learning (DL)-enabled reconstructions are comparable to those derived using traditional methods. CONCLUSION: qModeL enables the joint recovery of combined in-plane- and MB-accelerated dMRI utilizing DL.