Joint Supervised and Self-Supervised Training with Acquisition-Robust Techniques for Accelerated 4D Flow MRI Reconstruction
Mengyuan Xue, Bochun Mei
Abstract
4D flow MRI measures time-resolved, three-directional blood velocity but requires long acquisition times, and its diagnostic signal is carried by the phase difference \emph{between} velocity encodings, not by image magnitude. Recent work has developed a per-encoding variational network to address image reconstruction in this field. In this work, we incorporate a joint supervised and self-supervised training regime and utilize both magnitude and velocity data during supervision. At the same time, we add multiple acquisition-robust and conditioning strategies based on the acceleration factors. On the CMRx4DFlow~2026 aortic dataset (1.5 and 3T), our model lowers RelErr by $38$--$50\%$ and AngErr by $7.0$--$8.7^\circ$ against a training-matched baseline across $R{=}10$--$50$, improving on every held-out subject at every acceleration. Our model also shows strong generalization ability to transfer on out-of-distribution data by employing the joint training scheme, with an increase of $7.2\%$ in SSIM and decrease of $38\%$ and $31\%$ in AngErr and RelErr respectively.