Copyright © 2013 Wenlong Xu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Parallel imaging is a rapid magnetic resonance imaging technique. For the ill-conditioned problem, noise and aliasing artifacts are amplified during the reconstruction process and are serious especially for high accelerating imaging. In this paper, a sparse constrained reconstruction problem is proposed for parallel imaging, and an effective solution based on the variable splitting method is contrived. First-order and second-order norm optimization problems are first split, and then they are transferred to unconstrained minimization problem by the augmented Lagrangian method. At last, first-order norm and second-order norm optimization problems are alternatively resolved by different methods. With a discrepancy principle as the stopping criterion, analysis of simulated and actual parallel magnetic resonance image reconstruction is presented and discussed. Compared with the routine parallel imaging reconstruction methods, the results show that the noise and aliasing artifacts in the reconstructed image are evidently reduced at large acceleration factors.