Data augmentation for deep learning based accelerated MRI reconstruction

Deep neural networks have emerged as very successful tools for image restoration and reconstruction tasks. These networks are often trained end-to-end to directly reconstruct an image from a noisy or corrupted measurement of that image. To achieve state-of-the-art performance, training on large and diverse sets of images is considered critical. However, it is often difficult and/or expensive to collect large amounts of training images. Inspired by the success of Data Augmentation (DA) for classification problems, in this paper, we propose a pipeline for data augmentation for image reconstruction tasks arising in medical imaging and explore its effectiveness at reducing the required training data in a variety of settings. We focus on accelerated magnetic resonance imaging, where the goal is to reconstruct an image from a few under-sampled linear measurements. Our DA pipeline is specifically designed to utilize the invariances present in medical imaging measurements as naive DA strategies that neglect the physics of the problem fail. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our data augmentation pipeline by showing that for some problem regimes, DA can achieve comparable performance to the state of the art on the FastMRI dataset while using significantly fewer training data. Specifically, for 8-fold acceleration we achieve performance comparable to the state of the art with only $10\%$ of the training data for multi-coil reconstruction and with only $33\%$ of the training data for single-coil reconstruction. Our findings show that in the low-data regime DA is beneficial, whereas in the high-data regime it has diminishing returns.