Mahdi Saberi, Mehmet Akçakaya
MR image reconstruction techniques, from parallel imaging to compressed sensing to deep learning (DL), have been critical for reducing scan time with sub-sampled acquisitions. These methods have naturally all focused on complex-valued k-space measurements. On the other hand, theoretical results for sparse recovery have established that two random magnitude-only measurements, as in phase retrieval tasks, provide as much information as a single complex-valued measurement. However, these results have not translated into MRI reconstruction, as scenarios with magnitude-only measurements without access to corresponding complex data is unclear. In this work, with the advent of large-scale databases of raw data and physics-driven DL tools, we revisit the idea of combining image reconstruction and phase retrieval for MRI. We first investigate the k-space magnitude similarity across cardiac phases in cine MRI over a database, and establish this as a potential application. Subsequently, we propose a magnitude-informed PD-DL framework ( C + M a g PD-DL), which jointly leverages complex-valued and auxiliary magnitude information with a novel data-fidelity (DF) term. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach improves image sharpness and reduced artifacts compared to conventional PD-DL methods, highlighting the potential of integrating magnitude of k-space measurements as auxiliary information for improving MRI reconstruction.