I believe the main aim of this project is to accelerate the imaging process itself and not diagnostics.
It's a natural research direction to accelerate imaging; MRI is fundamentally limited in its data acquisition rate. You are essentially giving protons a wack into an excited state and extracting spatial information by listening to how they decay. There is a time constant associated with this decay that just comes from the physics and can't be reduced, and you have to wait for the decay to be more or less complete before you can give another wack and acquire another slice.
MRI already relies on classical compressed sensing to overcome this limitation and make imaging feasible at all, but there is good reason to think that you can do better than classical compressed sensing by making use of prior knowledge of the physics of the imaging process and the structure of natural tissue.
It's a natural research direction to accelerate imaging; MRI is fundamentally limited in its data acquisition rate. You are essentially giving protons a wack into an excited state and extracting spatial information by listening to how they decay. There is a time constant associated with this decay that just comes from the physics and can't be reduced, and you have to wait for the decay to be more or less complete before you can give another wack and acquire another slice.
MRI already relies on classical compressed sensing to overcome this limitation and make imaging feasible at all, but there is good reason to think that you can do better than classical compressed sensing by making use of prior knowledge of the physics of the imaging process and the structure of natural tissue.