No Arabic abstract
4D-flow magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an emerging imaging technique where spatiotemporal 3D blood velocity can be captured with full volumetric coverage in a single non-invasive examination. This enables qualitative and quantitative analysis of hemodynamic flow parameters of the heart and great vessels. An increase in the image resolution would provide more accuracy and allow better assessment of the blood flow, especially for patients with abnormal flows. However, this must be balanced with increasing imaging time. The recent success of deep learning in generating super resolution images shows promise for implementation in medical images. We utilized computational fluid dynamics simulations to generate fluid flow simulations and represent them as synthetic 4D flow MRI data. We built our training dataset to mimic actual 4D flow MRI data with its corresponding noise distribution. Our novel 4DFlowNet network was trained on this synthetic 4D flow data and was capable in producing noise-free super resolution 4D flow phase images with upsample factor of 2. We also tested the 4DFlowNet in actual 4D flow MR images of a phantom and normal volunteer data, and demonstrated comparable results with the actual flow rate measurements giving an absolute relative error of 0.6 to 5.8% and 1.1 to 3.8% in the phantom data and normal volunteer data, respectively.
High-resolution diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is beneficial for probing tissue microstructure in fine neuroanatomical structures, but long scan times and limited signal-to-noise ratio pose significant barriers to acquiring DTI at sub-millimeter resolution. To address this challenge, we propose a deep learning-based super-resolution method entitled SRDTI to synthesize high-resolution diffusion-weighted images (DWIs) from low-resolution DWIs. SRDTI employs a deep convolutional neural network (CNN), residual learning and multi-contrast imaging, and generates high-quality results with rich textural details and microstructural information, which are more similar to high-resolution ground truth than those from trilinear and cubic spline interpolation.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a widely used medical imaging modality. However, due to the limitations in hardware, scan time, and throughput, it is often clinically challenging to obtain high-quality MR images. The super-resolution approach is potentially promising to improve MR image quality without any hardware upgrade. In this paper, we propose an ensemble learning and deep learning framework for MR image super-resolution. In our study, we first enlarged low resolution images using 5 commonly used super-resolution algorithms and obtained differentially enlarged image datasets with complementary priors. Then, a generative adversarial network (GAN) is trained with each dataset to generate super-resolution MR images. Finally, a convolutional neural network is used for ensemble learning that synergizes the outputs of GANs into the final MR super-resolution images. According to our results, the ensemble learning results outcome any one of GAN outputs. Compared with some state-of-the-art deep learning-based super-resolution methods, our approach is advantageous in suppressing artifacts and keeping more image details.
Fetal motion is unpredictable and rapid on the scale of conventional MR scan times. Therefore, dynamic fetal MRI, which aims at capturing fetal motion and dynamics of fetal function, is limited to fast imaging techniques with compromises in image quality and resolution. Super-resolution for dynamic fetal MRI is still a challenge, especially when multi-oriented stacks of image slices for oversampling are not available and high temporal resolution for recording the dynamics of the fetus or placenta is desired. Further, fetal motion makes it difficult to acquire high-resolution images for supervised learning methods. To address this problem, in this work, we propose STRESS (Spatio-Temporal Resolution Enhancement with Simulated Scans), a self-supervised super-resolution framework for dynamic fetal MRI with interleaved slice acquisitions. Our proposed method simulates an interleaved slice acquisition along the high-resolution axis on the originally acquired data to generate pairs of low- and high-resolution images. Then, it trains a super-resolution network by exploiting both spatial and temporal correlations in the MR time series, which is used to enhance the resolution of the original data. Evaluations on both simulated and in utero data show that our proposed method outperforms other self-supervised super-resolution methods and improves image quality, which is beneficial to other downstream tasks and evaluations.
Acquiring High Resolution (HR) Magnetic Resonance (MR) images requires the patient to remain still for long periods of time, which causes patient discomfort and increases the probability of motion induced image artifacts. A possible solution is to acquire low resolution (LR) images and to process them with the Super Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (SRGAN) to create a super-resolved version. This work applies SRGAN to MR images of the prostate and performs three experiments. The first experiment explores improving the in-plane MR image resolution by factors of 4 and 8, and shows that, while the PSNR and SSIM (Structural SIMilarity) metrics are lower than the isotropic bicubic interpolation baseline, the SRGAN is able to create images that have high edge fidelity. The second experiment explores anisotropic super-resolution via synthetic images, in that the input images to the network are anisotropically downsampl
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is widely used for screening, diagnosis, image-guided therapy, and scientific research. A significant advantage of MRI over other imaging modalities such as computed tomography (CT) and nuclear imaging is that it clearly shows soft tissues in multi-contrasts. Compared with other medical image super-resolution (SR) methods that are in a single contrast, multi-contrast super-resolution studies can synergize multiple contrast images to achieve better super-resolution results. In this paper, we propose a one-level non-progressive neural network for low up-sampling multi-contrast super-resolution and a two-level progressive network for high up-sampling multi-contrast super-resolution. Multi-contrast information is combined in high-level feature space. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed networks can produce MRI super-resolution images with good image quality and outperform other multi-contrast super-resolution methods in terms of structural similarity and peak signal-to-noise ratio. Also, the progressive network produces a better SR image quality than the non-progressive network, even if the original low-resolution images were highly down-sampled.