Compressed Sensing Techniques Applied to Medical Images Obtained with Magnetic Resonance

The fast and reliable processing of medical images is of paramount importance to adequately generate data to feed machine learning algorithms that can prevent and diagnose health issues. Here, different compressed sensing techniques applied to magnetic resonance imaging are benchmarked as a means to reduce the acquisition time spent in the collection of data and signals that form the image. It is shown that by using these techniques, it is possible to reduce the number of signals needed and, therefore, substantially decrease the time to acquire the measurements. To this end, different algorithms are considered and compared: the iterative re-weighted least squares, the iterative soft thresholding algorithm, the iterative hard thresholding algorithm, the primal dual algorithm and the log barrier algorithm. Such algorithms have been implemented in different analysis programs that have been used to perform the reconstruction of the images, and it was found that the iterative soft thresholding algorithm gives the optimal results. It is found that the images obtained with this algorithm have lower quality than the original ones, but in any case, the quality should be good enough to distinguish each body structure and detect any health problems under an expert evaluation and/or statistical analysis.