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…

Weakly Convex Ridge Regularization for 3D Non-Cartesian MRI Reconstruction
2026-03-28 German Shâma Wache, Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna, Asma Tanabene, Sebastian Neumayer arXiv (Cornell University)

While highly accelerated non-Cartesian acquisition protocols significantly reduce scan time, they often entail long reconstruction delays. Deep learning based reconstruction methods can alleviate this, but often lack stability and robustness to distribution shifts.

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…

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…

Non-cartesian 3D-SPARKLING vs cartesian 3D-EPI encoding schemes for functional magnetic resonance Imaging at 7 Tesla
2024-05-13 Zaineb Amor, Philippe Ciuciu, Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna, et al. Plos one

The quest for higher spatial and/or temporal resolution in functional MRI (fMRI) while preserving a sufficient temporal signal-to-noise ratio (tSNR) has generated a tremendous amount of methodological contributions in the last decade ranging from Cartesian vs. non-Cartesian readouts, 2D vs.

B0 field distortions monitoring and correction for 3D non-Cartesian fMRI acquisitions using a field camera: Application to 3D-SPARKLING at 7T
2023-08-03 Zaineb Amor, Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna, Caroline Le Ster, et al. Joint Annual Meeting ISMRM-ESMRMB & ISMRT 31st Annual Meeting

The benefit of retrospective correction of static and dynamic B0 field imperfections was studied on non-Cartesian compressed sensing-based acquisition patterns by taking as an example 3D-SPARKLING encoding scheme. Long-TR dynamic acquisitions of T2*-weighted MRI (fMRI-like) volumes were acquired at 7T, retrospectively…

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…

Impact of ΔB0 field imperfections correction on BOLD sensitivity in 3D-SPARKLING fMRI data
2023-06-03 Zaineb Amor, Caroline Le Ster, Chaithya Giliyar Radhakrishna, et al. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine

Purpose Static and dynamic field imperfections are detrimental to functional MRI (fMRI) applications, especially at ultra‐high magnetic fields (UHF). In this work, a field camera is used to assess the benefits of retrospectively correcting field perturbations on Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) sensitivity 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.

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…