Cartesian SENSE and K-t SENSE Reconstruction Using Commodity Graphics Hardware

This study demonstrates that modern commodity graphics cards (GPUs) can be used to perform fast Cartesian SENSE and k-t SENSE reconstruction. Specifically, the SENSE inversion is accelerated by up to two orders of magnitude and is no longer the time-limiting step. The achieved reconstruction times are now well below the acquisition times, thus enabling real-time, interactive SENSE imaging, even with a large number of receive coils. The fast GPU reconstruction is also beneficial for datasets that are not acquired in real time. We demonstrate that it can be used for interactive adjustment of regularization parameters for k-t SENSE in the same way that one would adjust window and level settings. This enables a new way of performing imaging reconstruction, where the user chooses the setting of tunable reconstruction parameters, in real time, depending on the context in which the images are interpreted.