Projection reconstruction MR imaging using FOCUSS.

The focal underdetermined system solver (FOCUSS) was originally designed to obtain sparse solutions by successively solving quadratic optimization problems. This article adapts FOCUSS for a projection reconstruction MR imaging problem to obtain high resolution reconstructions from angular under-sampled radial k-space data. We show that FOCUSS is effective for projection reconstruction MRI, since medical images are usually sparse in some sense and the center region of the undersampled radial k-space samples still provides a low resolution, yet meaningful, image essential for the convergence of FOCUSS. The new algorithm is successfully applied for synthetic data as well as in vivo brain imaging obtained by under-sampled radial spin echo sequence.