Spectrally optimized implicit neural representations mitigate acquisition-related image quality trade-offs in intracranial 4D Flow MRI

Oliver Welin Odeback, Nerea González-Aranceta, Sebastián Jofre, Javier Bisbal, Edward Ferdian +10

4D Flow MRI promises opportunities for non-invasive mapping of neurovascular hemodynamics, but its clinical utility faces trade-offs between resolution, acquisition time, and noise. Deep learning-based super-resolution offers a post-scan solution, but supervised approaches require paired or domain-specific data, while patient-specific physics-informed models can be computationally demanding. This creates a need for unsupervised reconstruction models that can adapt to individual acquisitions without paired high-resolution training data, while remaining robust across anatomy, disease severity, and acquisition quality. To address this, we introduce a spectrally tuned implicit neural representation (INR) framework for intracranial 4D Flow MRI, representing the velocity field as a continuous coordinate-based neural field using WIRE activation functions with tunable spectral bias. Data-driven and physics-informed variants were evaluated in nine cerebrovascular cases spanning healthy controls and moderate-to-severe intracranial atherosclerotic disease, using CFD-derived high-resolution reference fields, MR-realistic synthetic low-resolution inputs, and direct fitting to acquired in-vivo…