Scan-Adaptive MRI Undersampling Using Neighbor-based Optimization (SUNO)

Abstract

Accelerated MRI involves collecting partial $k$-space measurements to reduce acquisition time, patient discomfort, and motion artifacts, and typically uses regular undersampling patterns or human-designed schemes. Recent works have studied population-adaptive sampling patterns learned from a group of patients (or scans). However, such patterns can be sub-optimal for individual scans, as they may fail to capture scan or slice-specific details, and their effectiveness can depend on the size and composition of the population. To overcome this issue, we propose a framework for jointly learning scan-adaptive Cartesian undersampling patterns and a corresponding reconstruction model from a training set. We use an alternating algorithm for learning the sampling patterns and the reconstruction model where we use an iterative coordinate descent (ICD) based offline optimization of scan-adaptive $k$-space sampling patterns for each example in the training set. A nearest neighbor search is then used to select the scan-adaptive sampling pattern at test time from initially acquired low-frequency $k$-space information. We applied the proposed framework (dubbed SUNO) to the fastMRI multi-coil knee and brain datasets, demonstrating improved performance over the currently used undersampling patterns at both $4\times$ and $8\times$ acceleration factors in terms of both visual quality and quantitative metrics. The code for the proposed framework is available at https://github.com/sidgautam95/adaptive-sampling-mri-suno. This paper has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging. The final published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1109/TCI.2026.3653330.