GSURE Denoising enables training of higher quality generative priors for accelerated Multi-Coil MRI Reconstruction

Motivation: Publicly available k-space data used for training are inherently noisy with no available ground truth. Goal(s): To denoise k-space data in an unsupervised manner for downstream applications. Approach: We use Generalized Stein’s Unbiased Risk Estimate (GSURE) applied to multi-coil MRI to denoise images without access to ground truth. Subsequently, we train a generative model to show improved accelerated MRI reconstruction. Results: We demonstrate: (1) GSURE can successfully remove noise from k-space; (2) generative priors learned on GSURE-denoised samples produce realistic synthetic samples; and (3) reconstruction performance on subsampled MRI improves using priors trained on denoised images in comparison to training on noisy samples. Impact: This abstract shows that we can denoise multi-coil data without ground truth and train deep generative models directly on noisy k-space in an unsupervised manner, for improved accelerated reconstruction.