Magic and Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Pradosh K Roy Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology Panipat , 132103 India roypkin@yahoo.com

In the year 2009, Shreyas Vasanawala a paediatric radiologist at the Lucile Packard Childrens Hospital at Stanford University didnt know for sure what was wrong with a 2- year old boy and hoped the MRI [1] would reveal the answer. The child had earler received a portion of a donors liver to replace his own failing organ. For a while, he did well. But his latest lab tests were alarming. Something was going wrong there was a chance that one or both of the livers bile ducts were blocked. Vasnawala needed a high resolution scan , but that would take a full two minutes for a standard MRI to capture the image, which would had been medically catastrophic for the child. Together with his colleague Michael Lusitig , Vasnawala used a new computational framewok which goes against the common wisdom of data acuisition and processing according to the Shannon Theorem . The technique , known as Compressed Sensing (CS) or compressive sampling dates back to 2004 and is due to Emmanuel Cands of Stanford University. Vasanawala and Lustig took an incomplete scan for 40 seconds only, during which the child had suffered no appreciable loss in blood oxygenation level and later that day, the Compressed Sensing algorithm was able to produce a sharp image from the brief scan, good enough for Vasanawala to see the blockages in both bile ducts. An interventional radiologist snaked a wire into each duct, gently clearing the blockages and installing tiny tubes that allowed the bile to drain properly. And with that a bit of math and a bit of medicine the childs lab test results headed back to normal [3]. The success of Vasanawal and Lustig is not an isolated one. Since 2007 research papers had started appearing in journals e.g. IEEE Transactiona on Medical Imaging , Magnetic Resonance in Medicine , Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance ,IEEE Signal Processing Magazine [4] reporting similar achievements. As another example , a fully sampled MR angiograph has been compared with a six times undersampled and sparse reconstructed image using - minimization in the adjoining figure. Compressed Sensing , the emerging sampling paradigm , asserts that if the signals has a sparse representation in some orthonormal basis, then one can recover the signals from far fewer non-adaptive linear measurements . The accuracy of the recovered signal is as good as that attainable with Transform Coding i.e. direct knowledge of sparsity , the most important coefficients and its locations. Moreover, a good approximation to those important coefficients is extracted from the measurements by solving a 1 - minimization problem . The nonadaptive measurements have the character of random linear combinations of the basis/frame coefficients. Gaussian and Bernoulli Random Matrices are preferred because they are maximally incoherent with known bases e.g. Wavelets , Cosine , Fourier.

Fig. Reproduced from Emmanuel Cands , Compresive Sensing : A 25 Minute Tour , First EU-US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, Cambridge, September 2010.

The fact that a signal can be recovered using only a few incoherent sparse measurements proportional to its information level has implications that are far reaching and leads to a number of possible applications in Data Compression , Channel Coding and Data Acquisition. The last of these applications suggest that CS could have an enormous impact in areas where conventional hardware design has significant limitations. This could lead to a very efficient method of data acquisition and storage in future. The potential pay-offs of CS are huge, comments Yonina Eldar , a researcher at Israel Institute of Technology , Haifa , Israel , as removing the Nyquist barrier in the resolution limited applications .. could make a prominent impact on the analog-digital world surrounding us.
REFERENCES

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[4] [5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wki/Magnetic_resonance_imaging Jordan Ellenberg , Fill in the Blanks : Using Math to Turn Lo-Res Datasets Into Hi-Res Samples, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_algorithm S. Vasanawala, M. Alley, R. Barth, B. Hargreaves, J. Pauly, and M. Lustig. Faster pediatric MRI via compressed sensing. In Proc. Annual Meeting Soc. Pediatric Radiology (SPR), Carlsbad, CA, Apr. 2009. Michael Lustig ,David L. Donoho , Juan M. Santos , John M. Pauly , Compressed Sensing MRI , IEEE Signal Processing Magazine , March 2008 , pp 72- 82. Emmanuel Candes , Compressive Sampling : A 25 Minute Tour , FirstEU-US Froniers of Enginering Symposium , Cambridge, Spetember, 2010.