Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) acquisition, reconstruction, and segmentation are usually processed independently in the conventional practice of MRI workflow. It is easy to notice that there are significant relevances among these tasks and this pro
cedure artificially cuts off these potential connections, which may lead to losing clinically important information for the final diagnosis. To involve these potential relations for further performance improvement, a sequential multi-task joint learning network model is proposed to train a combined end-to-end pipeline in a differentiable way, aiming at exploring the mutual influence among those tasks simultaneously. Our design consists of three cascaded modules: 1) deep sampling pattern learning module optimizes the $k$-space sampling pattern with predetermined sampling rate; 2) deep reconstruction module is dedicated to reconstructing MR images from the undersampled data using the learned sampling pattern; 3) deep segmentation module encodes MR images reconstructed from the previous module to segment the interested tissues. The proposed model retrieves the latently interactive and cyclic relations among those tasks, from which each task will be mutually beneficial. The proposed framework is verified on MRB dataset, which achieves superior performance on other SOTA methods in terms of both reconstruction and segmentation.
We propose a provably convergent method, called Efficient Learned Descent Algorithm (ELDA), for low-dose CT (LDCT) reconstruction. ELDA is a highly interpretable neural network architecture with learned parameters and meanwhile retains convergence gu
arantee as classical optimization algorithms. To improve reconstruction quality, the proposed ELDA also employs a new non-local feature mapping and an associated regularizer. We compare ELDA with several state-of-the-art deep image methods, such as RED-CNN and Learned Primal-Dual, on a set of LDCT reconstruction problems. Numerical experiments demonstrate improvement of reconstruction quality using ELDA with merely 19 layers, suggesting the promising performance of ELDA in solution accuracy and parameter efficiency.
Due to the presence of metallic implants, the imaging quality of computed tomography (CT) would be heavily degraded. With the rapid development of deep learning, several network models have been proposed for metal artifact reduction (MAR). Since the
dual-domain MAR methods can leverage the hybrid information from both sinogram and image domains, they have significantly improved the performance compared to single-domain methods. However,current dual-domain methods usually operate on both domains in a specific order, which implicitly imposes a certain priority prior into MAR and may ignore the latent information interaction between both domains. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel interactive dualdomain parallel network for CT MAR, dubbed as IDOLNet. Different from existing dual-domain methods, the proposed IDOL-Net is composed of two modules. The disentanglement module is utilized to generate high-quality prior sinogram and image as the complementary inputs. The follow-up refinement module consists of two parallel and interactive branches that simultaneously operate on image and sinogram domain, fully exploiting the latent information interaction between both domains. The simulated and clinical results demonstrate that the proposed IDOL-Net outperforms several state-of-the-art models in both qualitative and quantitative aspects.
Lowering the radiation dose in computed tomography (CT) can greatly reduce the potential risk to public health. However, the reconstructed images from the dose-reduced CT or low-dose CT (LDCT) suffer from severe noise, compromising the subsequent dia
gnosis and analysis. Recently, convolutional neural networks have achieved promising results in removing noise from LDCT images; the network architectures used are either handcrafted or built on top of conventional networks such as ResNet and U-Net. Recent advance on neural network architecture search (NAS) has proved that the network architecture has a dramatic effect on the model performance, which indicates that current network architectures for LDCT may be sub-optimal. Therefore, in this paper, we make the first attempt to apply NAS to LDCT and propose a multi-scale and multi-level NAS for LDCT denoising, termed MANAS. On the one hand, the proposed MANAS fuses features extracted by different scale cells to capture multi-scale image structural details. On the other hand, the proposed MANAS can search a hybrid cell- and network-level structure for better performance. Extensively experimental results on three different dose levels demonstrate that the proposed MANAS can achieve better performance in terms of preserving image structural details than several state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we also validate the effectiveness of the multi-scale and multi-level architecture for LDCT denoising.
Metal implants can heavily attenuate X-rays in computed tomography (CT) scans, leading to severe artifacts in reconstructed images, which significantly jeopardize image quality and negatively impact subsequent diagnoses and treatment planning. With t
he rapid development of deep learning in the field of medical imaging, several network models have been proposed for metal artifact reduction (MAR) in CT. Despite the encouraging results achieved by these methods, there is still much room to further improve performance. In this paper, a novel Dual-domain Adaptive-scaling Non-local network (DAN-Net) for MAR. We correct the corrupted sinogram using adaptive scaling first to preserve more tissue and bone details as a more informative input. Then, an end-to-end dual-domain network is adopted to successively process the sinogram and its corresponding reconstructed image generated by the analytical reconstruction layer. In addition, to better suppress the existing artifacts and restrain the potential secondary artifacts caused by inaccurate results of the sinogram-domain network, a novel residual sinogram learning strategy and nonlocal module are leveraged in the proposed network model. In the experiments, the proposed DAN-Net demonstrates performance competitive with several state-of-the-art MAR methods in both qualitative and quantitative aspects.
Current mainstream of CT reconstruction methods based on deep learning usually needs to fix the scanning geometry and dose level, which will significantly aggravate the training cost and need more training data for clinical application. In this paper
, we propose a parameter-dependent framework (PDF) which trains data with multiple scanning geometries and dose levels simultaneously. In the proposed PDF, the geometry and dose level are parameterized and fed into two multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs). The MLPs are leveraged to modulate the feature maps of CT reconstruction network, which condition the network outputs on different scanning geometries and dose levels. The experiments show that our proposed method can obtain competing performance similar to the original network trained with specific geometry and dose level, which can efficiently save the extra training cost for multiple scanning geometries and dose levels.
Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) scans, which can effectively alleviate the radiation problem, will degrade the imaging quality. In this paper, we propose a novel LDCT reconstruction network that unrolls the iterative scheme and performs in both i
mage and manifold spaces. Because patch manifolds of medical images have low-dimensional structures, we can build graphs from the manifolds. Then, we simultaneously leverage the spatial convolution to extract the local pixel-level features from the images and incorporate the graph convolution to analyze the nonlocal topological features in manifold space. The experiments show that our proposed method outperforms both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of state-of-the-art methods. In addition, aided by a projection loss component, our proposed method also demonstrates superior performance for semi-supervised learning. The network can remove most noise while maintaining the details of only 10% (40 slices) of the training data labeled.
Due to its noninvasive character, optical coherence tomography (OCT) has become a popular diagnostic method in clinical settings. However, the low-coherence interferometric imaging procedure is inevitably contaminated by heavy speckle noise, which im
pairs both visual quality and diagnosis of various ocular diseases. Although deep learning has been applied for image denoising and achieved promising results, the lack of well-registered clean and noisy image pairs makes it impractical for supervised learning-based approaches to achieve satisfactory OCT image denoising results. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised OCT image speckle reduction algorithm that does not rely on well-registered image pairs. Specifically, by employing the ideas of disentangled representation and generative adversarial network, the proposed method first disentangles the noisy image into content and noise spaces by corresponding encoders. Then, the generator is used to predict the denoised OCT image with the extracted content features. In addition, the noise patches cropped from the noisy image are utilized to facilitate more accurate disentanglement. Extensive experiments have been conducted, and the results suggest that our proposed method is superior to the classic methods and demonstrates competitive performance to several recently proposed learning-based approaches in both quantitative and qualitative aspects.
Compressed sensing magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI) is a theoretical framework that can accurately reconstruct images from undersampled k-space data with a much lower sampling rate than the one set by the classical Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem
. Therefore, CS-MRI can efficiently accelerate acquisition time and relieve the psychological burden on patients while maintaining high imaging quality. The problems with traditional CS-MRI reconstruction are solved by iterative numerical solvers, which usually suffer from expensive computational cost and the lack of accurate handcrafted priori. In this paper, inspired by deep learnings (DLs) fast inference and excellent end-to-end performance, we propose a novel cascaded convolutional neural network called MD-Recon-Net to facilitate fast and accurate MRI reconstruction. Especially, different from existing DL-based methods, which operate on single domain data or both domains in a certain order, our proposed MD-Recon-Net contains two parallel and interactive branches that simultaneously perform on k-space and spatial-domain data, exploring the latent relationship between k-space and the spatial domain. The simulated experimental results show that the proposed method not only achieves competitive visual effects to several state-of-the-art methods, but also outperforms other DL-based methods in terms of model scale and computational cost.
