Accelerated MR-STAT reconstructions using sparse Hessian approximations

MR-STAT is a quantitative magnetic resonance imaging framework for obtaining multi-parametric quantitative tissue parameter maps using data from single short scans. A large-scale optimization problem is solved in which spatial localization of signal and estimation of tissue parameters are performed simultaneously by directly fitting a Bloch-based volumetric signal model to measured time-domain data. In previous work, a highly parallelized, matrix-free Gauss-Newton reconstruction algorithm was presented that can solve the large-scale optimization problem for high-resolution scans. The main computational bottleneck in this matrix-free method is solving a linear system involving (an approximation to) the Hessian matrix at each iteration. In the current work, we analyze the structure of the Hessian matrix in relation to the dynamics of the spin system and derive conditions under which the (approximate) Hessian admits a sparse structure. In the case of Cartesian sampling patterns with smooth RF trains we demonstrate how exploiting this sparsity can reduce MR-STAT reconstruction times by approximately an order of magnitude.