A Sparse Model-Inspired Deep Thresholding Network for Exponential Signal Reconstruction—Application in Fast Biological Spectroscopy

The nonuniform sampling (NUS) is a powerful approach to enable fast acquisition but requires sophisticated reconstruction algorithms. Faithful reconstruction from partially sampled exponentials is highly expected in general signal processing and many applications. Deep learning (DL) has shown astonishing potential in this field, but many existing problems, such as lack of robustness and explainability, greatly limit its applications. In this work, by combining the merits of the sparse model-based optimization method and data-driven DL, we propose a DL architecture for spectra reconstruction from undersampled data, called MoDern. It follows the iterative reconstruction in solving a sparse model to build the neural network, and we elaborately design a learnable soft-thresholding to adaptively eliminate the spectrum artifacts introduced by undersampling. Extensive results on both synthetic and biological data show that MoDern enables more robust, high-fidelity, and ultrafast reconstruction than the state-of-the-art methods. Remarkably, MoDern has a small number of network parameters and is trained on solely synthetic data while generalizing well to biological data in various scenarios. Furthermore, we extend it to an open-access and easy-to-use cloud computing platform (XCloud-MoDern), contributing a promising strategy for further development of biological applications.