MRI Reconstruction with Fourier-Constrained Diffusion Bridges

Diffusion-based image priors have gained recent traction in MRI reconstruction. Common diffusion priors use a multi-step transformation to map Gaussian noise onto fully-sampled MRI data. However, this transformation diverges from the desired reconstruction transformation from undersampled to fully-sampled data, yielding suboptimal results. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Fourier-constrained diffusion bridges (FDB; https://github.com/icon-lab/FDB) for accelerated MRI reconstruction. FDB learns a multi-step transformation from undersampled to fully-sampled data guided by two degradation operators: random noise addition and random frequency removal. Unlike common diffusion priors that use an asymptotic endpoint (e.g., Gaussian noise), FDB performs a finite transformation with an endpoint based on moderately degraded data. Unlike common diffusion bridges that assume learnable forward and backward processes, FDB improves learning by injecting a task-relevant Fourier-domain constraint via its frequency removal operator. Demonstrations on brain MRI show that FDB outperforms state-of-the-art reconstruction methods including previous diffusion priors.