Accelerated CEST MRI by reconstruction using low-rank plus sparse decomposition in both k-space and image domain

Motivation: Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer (CEST) acceleration requires robust contrast recovery from under-sampled k-space data. Goal(s): To achieve accelerated CEST-MRI with well-preserved contrast among different tissue types. Approach: Herein we proposed a reconstruction method that iteratively decomposed both K-space and Image domains into Low-rank plus Sparse components, termed as KILS. Results: Retrospective experiments from the healthy adults and brain tumor patients indicated that KILS could achieve an 8X acceleration factor, with well-preserved contrast among different tissue types. Experiments conducted on human liver at 3T and rat brain at 9.4T demonstrated that KILS exhibited good general applicability, suggesting its potential clinical utility. Impact: We developed KILS, which utilizes an iterative low-rank plus sparse matrix decomposition in both k-space and image domains for robust CEST contrast recovery from under-sampled k-space data and holds significant potential.