The introduction of compressed sensing for increasing imaging speed in MRI has raised significant interest among researchers and clinicians, and has initiated a large body of research across multiple clinical applications over the last decade. Compressed sensing aims to reconstruct unaliased images from fewer measurements than that are traditionally required in MRI by exploiting image compressibility or sparsity. Moreover, appropriate combinations of compressed sensing with previously introduced fast imaging approaches, such as parallel imaging, have demonstrated further improved performance. The advent of compressed sensing marks the prelude to a new era of rapid MRI, where the focus of data acquisition has changed from sampling based on the nominal number of voxels and/or frames to sampling based on the desired information content. This paper presents a brief overview of the application of compressed sensing techniques in body MRI, where imaging speed is crucial due to the presence of respiratory motion along with stringent constraints on spatial and temporal resolution. The first section provides an overview of the basic compressed sensing methodology, including the notion of sparsity, incoherence, and non-linear reconstruction. The second section reviews state-of-the-art compressed sensing techniques that have been demonstrated for various clinical body MRI applications. In the final section, the paper discusses current challenges and future opportunities.

Purpose Conventional fat/water separation techniques require that patients hold breath during abdominal acquisitions, which often fails and limits the achievable spatial resolution and anatomic coverage. This work presents a novel approach for free-breathing volumetric fat/water separation. Theory and Methods Multi-echo data are acquired using a motion-robust radial stack-of-stars 3D GRE sequence with bipolar readout. To obtain fat/water maps, a model-based reconstruction is employed that accounts for the off-resonant blurring of fat and integrates both compressed sensing and parallel imaging. The approach additionally enables generation of respiration-resolved fat/water maps by detecting motion from k-space data and reconstructing different respiration states. Furthermore, an extension is described for dynamic contrast-enhanced fat-water-separated measurements. Results Uniform and robust fat/water separation is demonstrated in several clinical applications, including free-breathing non-contrast abdominal examination of adults and a pediatric subject with both motion-averaged and motion-resolved reconstructions, as well as in a non-contrast breast exam. Furthermore, dynamic contrast-enhanced fat/water imaging with high temporal resolution is demonstrated in the abdomen and breast. Conclusion The described framework provides a viable approach for motion-robust fat/water separation and promises particular value for clinical applications that are currently limited by the breath-holding capacity or cooperation of patients.

Purpose Magnetic resonance imaging protocols for the assessment of quantitative information suffer from long acquisition times since multiple measurements in a parametric dimension are required. To facilitate the clinical applicability, accelerating the acquisition is of high importance. To this end, we propose a model‐based optimization framework in conjunction with undersampling 3D radial stack‐of‐stars data. Theory and Methods High resolution 3D T 1 maps are generated from subsampled data by employing model‐based reconstruction combined with a regularization functional, coupling information from the spatial and parametric dimension, to exploit redundancies in the acquired parameter encodings and across parameter maps. To cope with the resulting non‐linear, non‐differentiable optimization problem, we propose a solution strategy based on the iteratively regularized Gauss‐Newton method. The importance of 3D‐spectral regularization is demonstrated by a comparison to 2D‐spectral regularized results. The algorithm is validated for the variable flip angle (VFA) and inversion recovery Look‐Locker (IRLL) method on numerical simulated data, MRI phantoms, and in vivo data. Results Evaluation of the proposed method using numerical simulations and phantom scans shows excellent quantitative agreement and image quality. T 1 maps from accelerated 3D in vivo measurements, e.g. 1.8 s/slice with the VFA method, are in high accordance with fully sampled reference reconstructions. Conclusions The proposed algorithm is able to recover T 1 maps with an isotropic resolution of 1 mm 3 from highly undersampled radial data by exploiting structural similarities in the imaging volume and across parameter maps.