MRI Non-Uniform Fast Fourier Transform (MRI-NUFFT)
2026-06-18 Pierre-Antoine Comby, Guillaume Daval‐Frérot, Asma Tanabene, et al. Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)

MRI-NUFFT is an open-source Python library that provides state-of-the-art non-Cartesian MRI tools: trajectories, data loading, fast and memory-efficient operators to be used on laptops, clusters, and MRI consoles.

Combining Cartesian and non-Cartesian acceleration techniques with SPARKLING for 1mm isotropic whole-brain MPRAGE in a minute
2026-05-29 Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna, Aurélien Massire, Blanche Bapst, et al. arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.31017

Purpose: T1-weighted MPRAGE remains a cornerstone of clinical anatomical imaging, yet its long acquisition times constrain routine use. Established acceleration techniques, namely Parallel Imaging (PI) and Compressed Sensing (CS), tend to introduce substantial noise and blurring when pushed to high acceleration…

Benchmarking 3D multi-coil NC-PDNet MRI reconstruction
2025-09-16 Asma Tanabene, Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna, Aurélien Massire, et al. 2025 IEEE 22nd International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI)

Motivation: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) show promise in reconstructing undersampled MRI data but face challenges with non-Cartesian 3D multi-coil acquisitions due to high memory demands and training complexity. Goal(s): To address the research gap in validating DNNs performances for non-Cartesian data in 3D multi-coil…

Bringing GRAPPA to non-Cartesian MRI through SPARKLING: An application to MP-RAGE anatomical MRI
2025-09-16 Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna, Alexandre Vignaud, Maxime Bertrait, et al. ISMRM & ISMRT 2025-Annual Meeting & Exhibition

Motivation: Well established clinically used parallel imaging techniques like GRAPPA and CAIPIRINHA are mostly limited to Cartesian sampling, and their extension to non-Cartesian sampling is not direct. Goal(s): We propose to extend the SPARKLING framework to ensure GRAPPA accelerated Cartesian sampling in k-space…

MRI-NUFFT: Doing non-Cartesian MRI has never been easier
2025-04-15 Pierre-Antoine Comby, Guillaume Daval‐Frérot, Caini Pan, et al. Journal of Open Source Software

MRI-NUFFT is a python package that provides a universal interface to various Non-Uniform Fast Fourier Transform libraries running on CPU or GPU (gpuNUFFT, finufft, cufinufft, pyNFFT), adding compatibility with standard array library (NumPy, CuPy, PyTorch, TensorFlow, etc.) On top of these libraries it extends the…

MRI-NUFFT: An open source Python package to make non-Cartesian MR Imaging easier
2024-11-26 Pierre-Antoine Comby, Guillaume Daval-Frerot, Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna, et al. 2025 ISMRM & ISMRT Annual Meeting & Exhibition

Motivation: Non-Cartesian imaging remains complicated to use for MRI due to the high computational cost of the Non-Uniform Fourier Transform for image reconstruction. Goal(s): To provide a uniform interface for reconstructing magnetic resonance images from non-Cartesian k-space data and a collection of non-Cartesian…

Benchmarking common and advanced non-Cartesian trajectories with high acceleration and static off-resonance effects
2024-08-14 Guillaume Daval-Frérot, Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna, Fernanda Ponce, et al. ISMRM & ISMRT Annual Meeting & Exhibition

Non-Cartesian sampling patterns allow for highly accelerated MRI exams at the cost of exacerbated and more complex artifacts, each impacting image quality in unique ways. Patient-induced B0 field inhomogeneities can notably cause distortions and blurring, but some trajectories are by design more robust to them.

Merging Cartesian and non-Cartesian sampling through GoLF-SPARKLING
2024-08-14 Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna, Guillaume Daval-Frérot, Aurélien Massire, et al. ISMRM & ISMRT Annual Meeting & Exhibition

Cartesian sampling can acquire a given k-space region with minimum redundancy, while non-Cartesian sampling can help achieve a larger k-space coverage. Through generalized affine constraints in SPARKLING and an adapted target sampling density, for the first time non-Cartesian and Cartesian sampling are merged within…

More-sparkling: non-Cartesian trajectories with minimized off-resonance effects
2023-08-03 Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna, Guillaume Daval-Frérot, Aurélien Massire, et al. Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of ISMRM

We augment the recently introduced SPARKLING algorithm and propose an improved mathematical formulation that takes the temporal dependence of the MR signal into account. This prevents the trajectories from sampling similar portions of k-space at different times, thereby reducing distortions and blurring induced by (B0…

Prospects of non-Cartesian 3D-SPARKLING encoding for functional MRI: A preliminary case study for retinotopic mapping
2023-08-03 Zaineb Amor, Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna, Guillaume Daval-Frérot, et al. Joint Annual Meeting ISMRM-ESMRMB & ISMRT 31st Annual Meeting

For the first time, non-Cartesian 3D-SPARKLING (Spreading Projection Algorithm for Rapid K-space sampLING) encoding scheme was used for task-based fMRI (retinotopic mapping) at 7T. Additionally, this new acquisition technique was compared with 3D-EPI, considered as one of the reference acquisition schemes in…

Improving spreading projection algorithm for rapid k-space sampling trajectories through minimized off-resonance effects and gridding of low frequencies
2023-05-22 Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna, Guillaume Daval-Frérot, Aurélien Massire, et al. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine

Purpose Non‐Cartesian MRI with long arbitrary readout directions are susceptible to off‐resonance artifacts due to patient induced inhomogeneities. This results in degraded image quality with strong signal losses and blurring.

Designing and learning non-Cartesian k-space sampling trajectories for accelerated 3D MRI
2023-04-25 Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna theses.fr (ABES)

Conception et apprentissage de trajectoires d'échantillonnage non cartésiennes dans l'espace k pour l'IRM 3D accélérée L'imagerie par résonance magnétique (IRM) est une technique d'imagerie médicale non invasive très répandue qui permet de comprendre les structures des tissus du corps humain. Cependant, sa portée et…

Jointly learning non-cartesian k-space trajectories and reconstruction networks for 2D and 3D MR imaging through projection
2023-01-24 Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna, Philippe Ciuciu Bioengineering

Compressed sensing in magnetic resonance imaging essentially involves the optimization of (1) the sampling pattern in k-space under MR hardware constraints and (2) image reconstruction from undersampled k-space data. Recently, deep learning methods have allowed the community to address both problems simultaneously,…

Benchmarking learned non-Cartesian k-space trajectories and reconstruction networks
2022-01-27 Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna, Philippe Ciuciu CoRR

We benchmark the current existing methods to jointly learn non-Cartesian k-space trajectory and reconstruction: PILOT, BJORK, and compare them with those obtained from the recently developed generalized hybrid learning (HybLearn) framework. We present the advantages of using projected gradient descent to enforce MR…

Hybrid learning of non-cartesian k-space trajectory and MR image reconstruction networks
2021-10-25 Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna, Zaccharie Ramzi, Philippe Ciuciu 2022 IEEE 19th International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI)

Compressed sensing (CS) in Magnetic resonance Imaging (MRI) essentially involves the optimization of 1) the sampling pattern in k-space under MR hardware constraints and 2) image reconstruction from the undersampled k-space data. Recently, deep learning methods have allowed the community to address both problems…

Learning the sampling density in 2D SPARKLING MRI acquisition for optimized image reconstruction
2021-08-23 Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna, Zaccharie Ramzi, Philippe Ciuciu 2021 29th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO)

The SPARKLING algorithm was originally developed for accelerated 2D magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the compressed sensing (CS) context. It yields non-Cartesian sampling trajectories that jointly fulfill a target sampling density while each individual trajectory complies with MR hardware constraints.

Optimizing full 3D SPARKLING trajectories for high-resolution T2*-weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging
2021-08-06 Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna, Pierre Weiss, Guillaume Daval-Frérot, et al. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging

The Spreading Projection Algorithm for Rapid K-space samplING, or SPARKLING, is an optimization-driven method that has been recently introduced for accelerated 2D T2*-w MRI using compressed sensing. It has then been extended to address 3D imaging using either stacks of 2D sampling patterns or a local 3D strategy that…