A Myocardial T1-Mapping Framework with Recurrent and U-Net Convolutional Neural Networks

Noise and aliasing artifacts arise in various accelerated cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging applications. In accelerated myocardial T1-mapping, the traditional three-parameter based nonlinear regression may not provide accurate estimates due to sensitivity to noise. A deep neural network-based framework is proposed to address this issue. The DeepT1 framework consists of recurrent and U-net convolution networks to produce a single output map from the noisy and incomplete measurements. The results show that DeepT1 provides noise-robust estimates compared to the traditional pixel-wise three parameter fitting.