Improved quantification in CEST‐MRI by joint spatial total generalized variation

Abstract Purpose In this work, the use of joint Total Generalized Variation (TGV) regularization to improve Multipool‐Lorentzian fitting of chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST) Spectra in terms of stability and parameter signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) was investigated. Theory and Methods The joint TGV term was integrated into the nonlinear parameter fitting problem. To increase convergence and weight the gradients, preconditioning using a voxel‐wise singular value decomposition was applied to the problem, which was then solved using the iteratively regularized Gauss–Newton method combined with a Primal‐Dual splitting algorithm. The TGV method was evaluated on simulated numerical phantoms, 3T phantom data and 7T in vivo data with respect to systematic errors and robustness. Three reference methods were also implemented: The standard nonlinear fitting, a method using a nonlocal‐means filter for denoising and the pyramid scheme, which uses downsampled images to acquire accurate start values. Results The proposed regularized fitting method showed significantly improved robustness (compared to the reference methods). In testing, over a range of SNR values the TGV fit outperformed the other methods and showed accurate results even for large amounts of added noise. Parameter values found were closer or comparable to the ground truth. For in vivo datasets, the added regularization increased the parameter map SNR and prevented instabilities. Conclusion The proposed fitting method using TGV regularization leads to improved results over a range of different data‐sets and noise levels. Furthermore, it can be applied to all Z‐spectrum data, with different amounts of pools, where the improved SNR and stability can increase diagnostic confidence.