Application-driven MRI: joint reconstruction and segmentation from undersampled MRI data.

Medical image segmentation has traditionally been regarded as a separate process from image acquisition and reconstruction, even though its performance directly depends on the quality and characteristics of these first stages of the imaging pipeline. Adopting an integrated acquisition-reconstruction-segmentation process can provide a more efficient and accurate solution. In this paper we propose a joint segmentation and reconstruction algorithm for undersampled magnetic resonance data. Merging a reconstructive patch-based sparse modelling and a discriminative Gaussian mixture modelling can produce images with enhanced edge information ultimately improving their segmentation.