No Arabic abstract
Deep learning-based image reconstruction methods have achieved promising results across multiple MRI applications. However, most approaches require large-scale fully-sampled ground truth data for supervised training. Acquiring fully-sampled data is often either difficult or impossible, particularly for dynamic contrast enhancement (DCE), 3D cardiac cine, and 4D flow. We present a deep learning framework for MRI reconstruction without any fully-sampled data using generative adversarial networks. We test the proposed method in two scenarios: retrospectively undersampled fast spin echo knee exams and prospectively undersampled abdominal DCE. The method recovers more anatomical structure compared to conventional 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.
Compressed sensing (CS) leverages the sparsity prior to provide the foundation for fast magnetic resonance imaging (fastMRI). However, iterative solvers for ill-posed problems hinder their adaption to time-critical applications. Moreover, such a prior can be neither rich to capture complicated anatomical structures nor applicable to meet the demand of high-fidelity reconstructions in modern MRI. Inspired by the state-of-the-art methods in image generation, we propose a novel attention-based deep learning framework to provide high-quality MRI reconstruction. We incorporate large-field contextual feature integration and attention selection in a generative adversarial network (GAN) framework. We demonstrate that the proposed model can produce superior results compared to other deep learning-based methods in terms of image quality, and relevance to the MRI reconstruction in an extremely low sampling rate diet.
Deep learning based generative adversarial networks (GAN) can effectively perform image reconstruction with under-sampled MR data. In general, a large number of training samples are required to improve the reconstruction performance of a certain model. However, in real clinical applications, it is difficult to obtain tens of thousands of raw patient data to train the model since saving k-space data is not in the routine clinical flow. Therefore, enhancing the generalizability of a network based on small samples is urgently needed. In this study, three novel applications were explored based on parallel imaging combined with the GAN model (PI-GAN) and transfer learning. The model was pre-trained with public Calgary brain images and then fine-tuned for use in (1) patients with tumors in our center; (2) different anatomies, including knee and liver; (3) different k-space sampling masks with acceleration factors (AFs) of 2 and 6. As for the brain tumor dataset, the transfer learning results could remove the artifacts found in PI-GAN and yield smoother brain edges. The transfer learning results for the knee and liver were superior to those of the PI-GAN model trained with its own dataset using a smaller number of training cases. However, the learning procedure converged more slowly in the knee datasets compared to the learning in the brain tumor datasets. The reconstruction performance was improved by transfer learning both in the models with AFs of 2 and 6. Of these two models, the one with AF=2 showed better results. The results also showed that transfer learning with the pre-trained model could solve the problem of inconsistency between the training and test datasets and facilitate generalization to unseen data.
Magnetic resonance image (MRI) reconstruction is a severely ill-posed linear inverse task demanding time and resource intensive computations that can substantially trade off {it accuracy} for {it speed} in real-time imaging. In addition, state-of-the-art compressed sensing (CS) analytics are not cognizant of the image {it diagnostic quality}. To cope with these challenges we put forth a novel CS framework that permeates benefits from generative adversarial networks (GAN) to train a (low-dimensional) manifold of diagnostic-quality MR images from historical patients. Leveraging a mixture of least-squares (LS) GANs and pixel-wise $ell_1$ cost, a deep residual network with skip connections is trained as the generator that learns to remove the {it aliasing} artifacts by projecting onto the manifold. LSGAN learns the texture details, while $ell_1$ controls the high-frequency noise. A multilayer convolutional neural network is then jointly trained based on diagnostic quality images to discriminate the projection quality. The test phase performs feed-forward propagation over the generator network that demands a very low computational overhead. Extensive evaluations are performed on a large contrast-enhanced MR dataset of pediatric patients. In particular, images rated based on expert radiologists corroborate that GANCS retrieves high contrast images with detailed texture relative to conventional CS, and pixel-wise schemes. In addition, it offers reconstruction under a few milliseconds, two orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art CS-MRI schemes.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an important medical imaging modality, but its acquisition speed is quite slow due to the physiological limitations. Recently, super-resolution methods have shown excellent performance in accelerating MRI. In some circumstances, it is difficult to obtain high-resolution images even with prolonged scan time. Therefore, we proposed a novel super-resolution method that uses a generative adversarial network (GAN) with cyclic loss and attention mechanism to generate high-resolution MR images from low-resolution MR images by a factor of 2. We implemented our model on pelvic images from healthy subjects as training and validation data, while those data from patients were used for testing. The MR dataset was obtained using different imaging sequences, including T2, T2W SPAIR, and mDIXON-W. Four methods, i.e., BICUBIC, SRCNN, SRGAN, and EDSR were used for comparison. Structural similarity, peak signal to noise ratio, root mean square error, and variance inflation factor were used as calculation indicators to evaluate the performances of the proposed method. Various experimental results showed that our method can better restore the details of the high-resolution MR image as compared to the other methods. In addition, the reconstructed high-resolution MR image can provide better lesion textures in the tumor patients, which is promising to be used in clinical diagnosis.