The FFT is used widely in signal processing for efficient computation of the Fourier transform (FT) of finitelength signals over a set of uniformly-spaced frequency locations. However, in many applications, one requires nonuniform sampling in the frequency domain, i.e.,a nonuniform FT . Several papers have described fast approximations for the nonuniform FT based on interpolating an oversampled FFT. This paper presents an interpolation method for the nonuniform FT that is optimal in the min-max sense of minimizing the worst-case approximation error over all signals of unit norm. The proposed method easily generalizes to multidimensional signals. Numerical results show that the min-max approach provides substantially lower approximation errors than conventional interpolation methods. The min-max criterion is also useful for optimizing the parameters of interpolation kernels such as the Kaiser-Bessel function.

The nonequispaced Fourier transform arises in a variety of application areas, from medical imaging to radio astronomy to the numerical solution of partial differential equations. In a typical problem, one is given an irregular sampling of N data in the frequency domain and one is interested in reconstructing the corresponding function in the physical domain. When the sampling is uniform, the fast Fourier transform (FFT) allows this calculation to be computed in O(N log N) operations rather than O(N 2) operations. Unfortunately, when the sampling is nonuniform, the FFT does not apply. Over the last few years, a number of algorithms have been developed to overcome this limitation and are often referred to as nonuniform FFTs (NUFFTs). These rely on a mixture of interpolation and the judicious use of the FFT on an oversampled grid [A. Dutt and V. Rokhlin, SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 14 (1993), pp. 1368–1383]. In this paper, we observe that one of the standard interpolation or “gridding ” schemes, based on Gaussians, can be accelerated by a significant factor without precomputation and storage of the interpolation weights. This is of particular value in two- and threedimensional settings, saving either 10dN in storage in d dimensions or a factor of about 5–10 in CPUtime (independent of dimension).

(*Dedicated to the memory of my mother who labored all her life for the next generation.) 1.

Thesis to the dissertation examination

Supervisor: doc. Ing. Miloˇs Drutarovsk´y, CSc. ”If we save even one life, we have been cost effective.”

Abstract not found

Non-Cartesian sampling is widely used for fast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Accurate and fast image reconstruction from non-Cartesian k-space data becomes a challenge and gains a lot of attention. Images provided by conventional direct reconstruction methods usually bear ringing, streaking, and other leakage artifacts caused by discontinuous structures. In this paper, we tackle these problems by analyzing the principal point spread function (PSF) of non-Cartesian reconstruction and propose a leakage reduction reconstruction scheme based on discontinuity subtraction. Data fidelity in k-space is enforced during each iteration. Multidimensional nonuniform fast Fourier transform (NUFFT) algorithms are utilized to simulate the k-space samples as well as to reconstruct images. The proposed method is compared to the direct reconstruction method on computer-simulated phantoms and physical scans. Non-Cartesian sampling trajectories including 2D spiral, 2D and 3D radial trajectories are studied. The proposed method is found useful on reducing artifacts due to high image discontinuities. It also improves the quality of images reconstructed from undersampled data. Copyright © 2006 J. Song and Q. H. Liu. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1.