Personalized synthetic MR imaging with deep learning enhancements

Personalized synthetic MRI (syn‐MRI) uses MR images of an individual subject acquired at a few design parameters (echo time, repetition time, flip angle) to obtain underlying parametric (ρ,T1,T2)$$ \left(\rho, {\mathrm{T}}_1,{\mathrm{T}}_2\right) $$ maps, from where MR images of that individual at other design parameter settings are synthesized. However, classical methods that use least‐squares (LS) or maximum likelihood estimators (MLE) are unsatisfactory at higher noise levels because the underlying inverse problem is ill‐posed. This article provides a pipeline to enhance the synthesis of such images in three‐dimensional (3D) using a deep learning (DL) neural network architecture for spatial regularization in a personalized setting where having more than a few training images is impractical.