No Arabic abstract
Compressive sensing (CS) is widely used to reduce the acquisition time of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Although state-of-the-art deep learning based methods have been able to obtain fast, high-quality reconstruction of CS-MR images, their main drawback is that they treat complex-valued MRI data as real-valued entities. Most methods either extract the magnitude from the complex-valued entities or concatenate them as two real-valued channels. In both the cases, the phase content, which links the real and imaginary parts of the complex-valued entities, is discarded. In order to address the fundamental problem of real-valued deep networks, i.e. their inability to process complex-valued data, we propose a novel framework based on a complex-valued generative adversarial network (Co-VeGAN). Our model can process complex-valued input, which enables it to perform high-quality reconstruction of the CS-MR images. Further, considering that phase is a crucial component of complex-valued entities, we propose a novel complex-valued activation function, which is sensitive to the phase of the input. Extensive evaluation of the proposed approach on different datasets using various sampling masks demonstrates that the proposed model significantly outperforms the existing CS-MRI reconstruction techniques in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio as well as structural similarity index. Further, it uses significantly fewer trainable parameters to do so, as compared to the real-valued deep learning based methods.
Compressive sensing magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI) accelerates the acquisition of MR images by breaking the Nyquist sampling limit. In this work, a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) based framework for CS-MRI reconstruction is proposed. Leveraging a combination of patch-based discriminator and structural similarity index based loss, our model focuses on preserving high frequency content as well as fine textural details in the reconstructed image. Dense and residual connections have been incorporated in a U-net based generator architecture to allow easier transfer of information as well as variable network length. We show that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of quality of reconstruction and robustness to noise. Also, the reconstruction time, which is of the order of milliseconds, makes it highly suitable for real-time clinical use.
We present a deep network interpolation strategy for accelerated parallel MR image reconstruction. In particular, we examine the network interpolation in parameter space between a source model that is formulated in an unrolled scheme with L1 and SSIM losses and its counterpart that is trained with an adversarial loss. We show that by interpolating between the two different models of the same network structure, the new interpolated network can model a trade-off between perceptual quality and fidelity.
Neural network-based approaches can achieve high accuracy in various medical image segmentation tasks. However, they generally require large labelled datasets for supervised learning. Acquiring and manually labelling a large medical dataset is expensive and sometimes impractical due to data sharing and privacy issues. In this work, we propose an adversarial data augmentation method for training neural networks for medical image segmentation. Instead of generating pixel-wise adversarial attacks, our model generates plausible and realistic signal corruptions, which models the intensity inhomogeneities caused by a common type of artefacts in MR imaging: bias field. The proposed method does not rely on generative networks, and can be used as a plug-in module for general segmentation networks in both supervised and semi-supervised learning. Using cardiac MR imaging we show that such an approach can improve the generalization ability and robustness of models as well as provide significant improvements in low-data scenarios.
Machine learning technologies using deep neural networks (DNNs), especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have made automated, accurate, and fast medical image analysis a reality for many applications, and some DNN-based medical image analysis systems have even been FDA-cleared. Despite the progress, challenges remain to build DNNs as reliable as human expert doctors. It is known that DNN classifiers may not be robust to noises: by adding a small amount of noise to an input image, a DNN classifier may make a wrong classification of the noisy image (i.e., in-distribution adversarial sample), whereas it makes the right classification of the clean image. Another issue is caused by out-of-distribution samples that are not similar to any sample in the training set. Given such a sample as input, the output of a DNN will become meaningless. In this study, we investigated the in-distribution (IND) and out-of-distribution (OOD) adversarial robustness of a representative CNN for lumbar disk shape reconstruction from spine MR images. To study the relationship between dataset size and robustness to IND adversarial attacks, we used a data augmentation method to create training sets with different levels of shape variations. We utilized the PGD-based algorithm for IND adversarial attacks and extended it for OOD adversarial attacks to generate OOD adversarial samples for model testing. The results show that IND adversarial training can improve the CNN robustness to IND adversarial attacks, and larger training datasets may lead to higher IND robustness. However, it is still a challenge to defend against OOD adversarial attacks.
Many real-world signal sources are complex-valued, having real and imaginary components. However, the vast majority of existing deep learning platforms and network architectures do not support the use of complex-valued data. MRI data is inherently complex-valued, so existing approaches discard the richer algebraic structure of the complex data. In this work, we investigate end-to-end complex-valued convolutional neural networks - specifically, for image reconstruction in lieu of two-channel real-valued networks. We apply this to magnetic resonance imaging reconstruction for the purpose of accelerating scan times and determine the performance of various promising complex-valued activation functions. We find that complex-valued CNNs with complex-valued convolutions provide superior reconstructions compared to real-valued convolutions with the same number of trainable parameters, over a variety of network architectures and datasets.