A divide-and-conquer strategy to overcome memory limitations of current GPUs for high resolution MRI reconstruction via a domain transform deep learning method

Direct learning of a domain transform to reconstruct images with flexible data acquisition schemes represents a step to achieve intelligence in image reconstruction. However, a technical challenge that is encountered with the domain transform type of learning strategy is that current network architectures and training strategies are GPU memory hungry. As a result, given the currently available GPUs with memory on the order of 24 GB, it is very difficult to achieve high resolution (beyond 128x128) MRI reconstruction. The main purpose of this paper is to present a divide-and-conquer strategy to reconstruct high resolution (better than 256x256) MRI images via domain transform learning while staying within the current GPU memory restrictions.