Nex-Gen Personalized MRI: Boosting Low-Field MRI Reconstruction with a Feature-Fusion Transformer and High-Field Priors

Motivation: Low-field MRI offers low-cost imaging but suffers from prolonged, low-SNR scans. Goal(s): To explore a novel future personalized-healthcare strategy, combining high- and low-field MRI. We suggest harnessing data from baseline high-field scans to boost speed and quality of follow-up low-field scans. To our knowledge, this is the first study to explore this approach. Approach: We introduce ViT-Fuser, a novel multi-head vision transformer that fuses high- and low-field features and a hybrid loss function that facilitates high-quality reconstructions. Results: Our ViT-Fuser and hybrid loss outperform other methods, e.g. MoDL and vision-transformers, significantly improving image quality in accelerated low-field scans. Impact: We introduce ViT-Fuser and the hybrid loss, a promising solution for accelerating and enhancing low-field MRI by leveraging high-field reference scans from the same subject. Our approach defines a personalized imaging strategy and outperforms state-of-the-art reconstruction methods and losses.