Fast and accurate reconstruction of accelerated 7T susceptibility-weighted imaging using multi-scale hybrid CNN-Transformer network

Motivation: Susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI) at ultra-high field 7T is a powerful tool for evaluating a wide range of pathology, but has long acquisition time. Goal(s): To investigate the diagnostic performances of highly accelerated 7T SWI using multi-scale hybrid CNN-Transformer Network (MACT-Net). Approach: The diagnostic performances of the MSCT-Net reconstructed images for identifying swallow tail sign (STS) and distinguishing Parkinson's disease (PD) patients from healthy controls were evaluated on an independent PD cohort. Results: With a 6-8-times acceleration, MSCT-Net showed comparable diagnostic performance to the fully sampled 7T SWI for discriminating PD from healthy controls using the bilateral STS evaluation score. Impact: The potentially reduced scan time with MSCT-Net offers new possibilities for widely adoption of 7T SWI in clinical brain imaging. Furthermore, the approach has the potential to guide design of reconstruction models for other high-resolution 7T MRI data.