Frequency Error-Guided Under-sampling Optimization for Multi-Contrast MRI Reconstruction

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays a vital role in clinical diagnostics, yet it remains hindered by long acquisition times and motion artifacts. Multi-contrast MRI reconstruction has emerged as a promising direction by leveraging complementary information from fully-sampled reference scans. However, existing approaches suffer from three major limitations: (1) superficial reference fusion strategies, such as simple concatenation, (2) insufficient utilization of the complementary information provided by the reference contrast, and (3) fixed under-sampling patterns. We propose an efficient and interpretable frequency error-guided reconstruction framework to tackle these issues. We first employ a conditional diffusion model to learn a Frequency Error Prior (FEP), which is then incorporated into a unified framework for jointly optimizing both the under-sampling pattern and the reconstruction network. The proposed reconstruction model employs a model-driven deep unfolding framework that jointly exploits frequency- and image-domain information. In addition, a spatial alignment module and a reference feature decomposition strategy are incorporated to improve reconstruction quality and bridge model-based optimization with data-driven learning for improved physical interpretability. Comprehensive validation across multiple imaging modalities, acceleration rates (4-30x), and sampling schemes demonstrates consistent superiority over state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative metrics and visual quality. All codes are available at https://github.com/fangxinming/JUF-MRI.