No Arabic abstract
In neuroimaging, MRI tissue properties characterize underlying neurobiology, provide quantitative biomarkers for neurological disease detection and analysis, and can be used to synthesize arbitrary MRI contrasts. Estimating tissue properties from a single scan session using a protocol available on all clinical scanners promises to reduce scan time and cost, enable quantitative analysis in routine clinical scans and provide scan-independent biomarkers of disease. However, existing tissue properties estimation methods - most often $mathbf{T_1}$ relaxation, $mathbf{T_2^*}$ relaxation, and proton density ($mathbf{PD}$) - require data from multiple scan sessions and cannot estimate all properties from a single clinically available MRI protocol such as the multiecho MRI scan. In addition, the widespread use of non-standard acquisition parameters across clinical imaging sites require estimation methods that can generalize across varying scanner parameters. However, existing learning methods are acquisition protocol specific and cannot estimate from heterogenous clinical data from different imaging sites. In this work we propose an unsupervised deep-learning strategy that employs MRI physics to estimate all three tissue properties from a single multiecho MRI scan session, and generalizes across varying acquisition parameters. The proposed strategy optimizes accurate synthesis of new MRI contrasts from estimated latent tissue properties, enabling unsupervised training, we also employ random acquisition parameters during training to achieve acquisition generalization. We provide the first demonstration of estimating all tissue properties from a single multiecho scan session. We demonstrate improved accuracy and generalizability for tissue property estimation and MRI synthesis.
Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI) is the only non-invasive approach for estimation of intra-voxel tissue microarchitecture and reconstruction of in vivo neural pathways for the human brain. With improvement in accelerated MRI acquisition technologies, DW-MRI protocols that make use of multiple levels of diffusion sensitization have gained popularity. A well-known advanced method for reconstruction of white matter microstructure that uses multi-shell data is multi-tissue constrained spherical deconvolution (MT-CSD). MT-CSD substantially improves the resolution of intra-voxel structure over the traditional single shell version, constrained spherical deconvolution (CSD). Herein, we explore the possibility of using deep learning on single shell data (using the b=1000 s/mm2 from the Human Connectome Project (HCP)) to estimate the information content captured by 8th order MT-CSD using the full three shell data (b=1000, 2000, and 3000 s/mm2 from HCP). Briefly, we examine two network architectures: 1.) Sequential network of fully connected dense layers with a residual block in the middle (ResDNN), 2.) Patch based convolutional neural network with a residual block (ResCNN). For both networks an additional output block for estimation of voxel fraction was used with a modified loss function. Each approach was compared against the baseline of using MT-CSD on all data on 15 subjects from the HCP divided into 5 training, 2 validation, and 8 testing subjects with a total of 6.7 million voxels. The fiber orientation distribution function (fODF) can be recovered with high correlation (0.77 vs 0.74 and 0.65) as compared to the ground truth of MT-CST, which was derived from the multi-shell DW-MRI acquisitions. Source code and models have been made publicly available.
Deep learning has achieved good success in cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction, in which convolutional neural networks (CNNs) learn a mapping from the undersampled k-space to the fully sampled images. Although these deep learning methods can improve the reconstruction quality compared with iterative methods without requiring complex parameter selection or lengthy reconstruction time, the following issues still need to be addressed: 1) all these methods are based on big data and require a large amount of fully sampled MRI data, which is always difficult to obtain for cardiac MRI; 2) the effect of coil correlation on reconstruction in deep learning methods for dynamic MR imaging has never been studied. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised deep learning method for multi-coil cine MRI via a time-interleaved sampling strategy. Specifically, a time-interleaved acquisition scheme is utilized to build a set of fully encoded reference data by directly merging the k-space data of adjacent time frames. Then these fully encoded data can be used to train a parallel network for reconstructing images of each coil separately. Finally, the images from each coil are combined via a CNN to implicitly explore the correlations between coils. The comparisons with classic k-t FOCUSS, k-t SLR, L+S and KLR methods on in vivo datasets show that our method can achieve improved reconstruction results in an extremely short amount of time.
Non-rigid cortical registration is an important and challenging task due to the geometric complexity of the human cortex and the high degree of inter-subject variability. A conventional solution is to use a spherical representation of surface properties and perform registration by aligning cortical folding patterns in that space. This strategy produces accurate spatial alignment but often requires a high computational cost. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated the potential to dramatically speed up volumetric registration. However, due to distortions introduced by projecting a sphere to a 2D plane, a direct application of recent learning-based methods to surfaces yields poor results. In this study, we present SphereMorph, a diffeomorphic registration framework for cortical surfaces using deep networks that addresses these issues. SphereMorph uses a UNet-style network associated with a spherical kernel to learn the displacement field and warps the sphere using a modified spatial transformer layer. We propose a resampling weight in computing the data fitting loss to account for distortions introduced by polar projection, and demonstrate the performance of our proposed method on two tasks, including cortical parcellation and group-wise functional area alignment. The experiments show that the proposed SphereMorph is capable of modeling the geometric registration problem in a CNN framework and demonstrate superior registration accuracy and computational efficiency. The source code of SphereMorph will be released to the public upon acceptance of this manuscript at https://github.com/voxelmorph/spheremorph.
Deep Learning (DL) has shown potential in accelerating Magnetic Resonance Image acquisition and reconstruction. Nevertheless, there is a dearth of tailored methods to guarantee that the reconstruction of small features is achieved with high fidelity. In this work, we employ adversarial attacks to generate small synthetic perturbations, which are difficult to reconstruct for a trained DL reconstruction network. Then, we use robust training to increase the networks sensitivity to these small features and encourage their reconstruction. Next, we investigate the generalization of said approach to real world features. For this, a musculoskeletal radiologist annotated a set of cartilage and meniscal lesions from the knee Fast-MRI dataset, and a classification network was devised to assess the reconstruction of the features. Experimental results show that by introducing robust training to a reconstruction network, the rate of false negative features (4.8%) in image reconstruction can be reduced. These results are encouraging, and highlight the necessity for attention to this problem by the image reconstruction community, as a milestone for the introduction of DL reconstruction in clinical practice. To support further research, we make our annotations and code publicly available at https://github.com/fcaliva/fastMRI_BB_abnormalities_annotation.
In the area of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), an extensive range of non-linear reconstruction algorithms have been proposed that can be used with general Fourier subsampling patterns. However, the design of these subsampling patterns has typically been considered in isolation from the reconstruction rule and the anatomy under consideration. In this paper, we propose a learning-based framework for optimizing MRI subsampling patterns for a specific reconstruction rule and anatomy, considering both the noiseless and noisy settings. Our learning algorithm has access to a representative set of training signals, and searches for a sampling pattern that performs well on average for the signals in this set. We present a novel parameter-free greedy mask selection method, and show it to be effective for a variety of reconstruction rules and performance metrics. Moreover we also support our numerical findings by providing a rigorous justification of our framework via statistical learning theory.