The paper addresses the problem of compressive sensing MRI (CS-MRI) by proposing a "deep unfolding" approach (cf. http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.2574) with a sparsity-based data prior and inference via ADMM. All layers of the proposed ADMM-Net are based on a generalization of ADMM inference steps and are discriminatively trained to minimize a reconstruction error. In contrast to other methods for CS-MRI, the proposed approach offers both high reconstruction quality and fast run-time.

The basic idea is to convert the convention optimization based CS reconstruction algorithm into a fixed neural network learned with back-propagation algorithm. Specifically, the ADMM-based CS reconstruction is approximated with a deep neural network. Experimental results show that the approximated neural network outperforms several existing CS-MRI algorithms with less computational time.

The ADMM algorithm has proven to be useful for solving problems with differentiable and non-differentiable terms, and therefore has a clear link with compressed sensing. Experiments prove some gain in performance with respect to the state of the art, specially in terms of computational cost at test time.