Iterative PET Image Reconstruction Using Convolutional Neural Network Representation
Gordon Center for Medical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School（马萨诸塞州总医院与哈佛医学院戈登医学影像中心）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Davis（加利福尼亚大学戴维斯分校生物医学工程系）；Department of Statistics, University of California, Davis（加利福尼亚大学戴维斯分校统计系）
Kuang Gong, Jiahui Guan, Kyungsang Kim, Xuezhu Zhang, Georges El Fakhri, Jinyi Qi, Quanzheng Li
PET image reconstruction is challenging due to the ill-poseness of the inverse problem and limited number of detected photons. Recently deep neural networks have been widely and successfully used in computer vision tasks and attracted growing interests in medical imaging. In this work, we trained a deep residual convolutional neural network to improve PET image quality by using the existing inter-patient information. An innovative feature of the proposed method is that we embed the neural network in the iterative reconstruction framework for image representation, rather than using it as a post-processing tool. We formulate the objective function as a constraint optimization problem and solve it using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm. Both simulation data and hybrid real data are used to evaluate the proposed method. Quantification results show that our proposed iterative neural network method can outperform the neural network denoising and conventional penalized maximum likelihood methods.
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；GE Healthcare（通用电气医疗集团）；University of California Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）
Accurate quantification of cerebral blood flow (CBF) is essential for the diagnosis and assessment of a wide range of neurological diseases. Positron emission tomography (PET) with radiolabeled water (15O-water) is considered the gold-standard for the measurement of CBF in humans. PET imaging, however, is not widely available because of its prohibitive costs and use of short-lived radiopharmaceutical tracers that typically require onsite cyclotron production. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), in contrast, is more readily accessible and does not involve ionizing radiation. This study presents a…
In recent days, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have demonstrated impressive performance in medical image analysis. However, there is a lack of clear understanding of why and how the Convolutional Neural Network performs so well for image analysis task. How CNN analyzes an image and discriminates among samples of different classes are usually considered as non-transparent. As a result, it becomes difficult to apply CNN based approaches in clinical procedures and automated disease diagnosis systems. In this paper, we consider this issue and work on visualizing and understanding the decision…
University of Patras（帕特雷大学）；School of Medicine（医学院）；Laboratory of Nuclear Medicine（核医学实验室）
Lung Cancer is the most common cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Early and automatic diagnosis of Solitary Pulmonary Nodules (SPN) in Computer Tomography (CT) chest scans can provide early treatment as well as doctor liberation from time-consuming procedures. Deep Learning has been proven as a popular and influential method in many medical imaging diagnosis areas. In this study, we consider the problem of diagnostic classification between benign and malignant lung nodules in CT images derived from a PET/CT scanner. More specifically, we intend to develop experimental Convolutional Neura…
In medical imaging, radiological scans of different modalities serve to enhance different sets of features for clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. This variety enriches the source information that could be used for outcome prediction. Deep learning methods are particularly well-suited for feature extraction from high-dimensional inputs such as images. In this work, we apply a CNN classification network augmented with a FCN preprocessor sub-network to a public TCIA head and neck cancer dataset. The training goal is survival prediction of radiotherapy cases based on pre-treatment FDG PET-…
Paul C. Lauterbur Research Center for Biomedical Imaging, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院保罗·C·劳特伯生物医学成像研究中心）；Research center for Medical AI, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院医学人工智能研究中心）；Nanchang University（南昌大学）；University at Buffalo, the State University of New York（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）
Medical imaging is playing a more and more important role in clinics. However, there are several issues in different imaging modalities such as slow imaging speed in MRI, radiation injury in CT and PET. Therefore, accelerating MRI, reducing radiation dose in CT and PET have been ongoing research topics since their invention. Usually, acquiring less data is a direct but important strategy to address these issues. However, less acquisition usually results in aliasing artifacts in reconstructions. Recently, deep learning (DL) has been introduced in medical image reconstruction and shown potential…
Neural circuits can be reconstructed from brain images acquired by serial section electron microscopy. Image analysis has been performed by manual labor for half a century, and efforts at automation date back almost as far. Convolutional nets were first applied to neuronal boundary detection a dozen years ago, and have now achieved impressive accuracy on clean images. Robust handling of image defects is a major outstanding challenge. Convolutional nets are also being employed for other tasks in neural circuit reconstruction: finding synapses and identifying synaptic partners, extending or prun…
Learning Normalized Inputs for Iterative Estimation in Medical Image Segmentation
École Polytechnique de Montréal（蒙特利尔理工学院）；Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms（蒙特利尔学习算法研究所）；Imagia Inc.（Imagia公司）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；CHUM Research Center（CHUM研究中心）
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；GE Healthcare（通用电气医疗集团）；University of California Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）；National Taiwan University（台湾大学）
Accurate quantification of cerebral blood flow (CBF) is essential for the diagnosis and assessment of cerebrovascular diseases such as Moyamoya, carotid stenosis, aneurysms, and stroke. Positron emission tomography (PET) is currently regarded as the gold standard for the measurement of CBF in the human brain. PET imaging, however, is not widely available because of its prohibitive costs, use of ionizing radiation, and logistical challenges, which require a co-localized cyclotron to deliver the 2 min half-life Oxygen-15 radioisotope. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), in contrast, is more readil…
University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Royal Prince Alfred Hospital（阿尔弗雷德王子医院）
The analysis of multi-modality positron emission tomography and computed tomography (PET-CT) images for computer aided diagnosis applications requires combining the sensitivity of PET to detect abnormal regions with anatomical localization from CT. Current methods for PET-CT image analysis either process the modalities separately or fuse information from each modality based on knowledge about the image analysis task. These methods generally do not consider the spatially varying visual characteristics that encode different information across the different modalities, which have different priori…
ARC Training Centre for Innovative BioEngineering（ARC创新生物工程培训中心）
Distant metastases (DM) refer to the dissemination of tumors, usually, beyond the organ where the tumor originated. They are the leading cause of death in patients with soft-tissue sarcomas (STSs). Positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET-CT) is regarded as the imaging modality of choice for the management of STSs. It is difficult to determine from imaging studies which STS patients will develop metastases. 'Radiomics' refers to the extraction and analysis of quantitative features from medical images and it has been employed to help identify such tumors. The state-of-the-art in ra…
University of California, San Francisco（加州大学旧金山分校）；Microsoft（微软）
Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) have demonstrated its capability to convert MR image to pseudo CT for PET attenuation correction in PET/MRI. Conventionally, attenuated events are corrected in sinogram space using attenuation maps derived from CT or MR-derived pseudo CT. Separately, scattered events are iteratively estimated by a 3D model-based simulation using down-sampled attenuation and emission sinograms. However, no studies have investigated joint correction of attenuation and scatter using DCNN in image space. Therefore, we aim to develop and optimize a DCNN model for attenuatio…
General Electric Healthcare（通用电气医疗集团）；University of Rouen（鲁昂大学）；Henri Becquerel Center（亨利·贝克勒尔中心）
One of the most challenges in medical imaging is the lack of data and annotated data. It is proven that classical segmentation methods such as U-NET are useful but still limited due to the lack of annotated data. Using a weakly supervised learning is a promising way to address this problem, however, it is challenging to train one model to detect and locate efficiently different type of lesions due to the huge variation in images. In this paper, we present a novel approach to locate different type of lesions in positron emission tomography (PET) images using only a class label at the image-leve…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）
Dynamic positron emission tomography (dPET) image reconstruction is extremely challenging due to the limited counts received in individual frame. In this paper, we propose a spatial-temporal convolutional primal dual network (STPDnet) for dynamic PET image reconstruction. Both spatial and temporal correlations are encoded by 3D convolution operators. The physical projection of PET is embedded in the iterative learning process of the network, which provides the physical constraints and enhances interpretability. The experiments of real rat scan data have shown that the proposed method can achie…
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc.（美国西门子医疗解决方案公司）
Subject motion in whole-body dynamic PET introduces inter-frame mismatch and seriously impacts parametric imaging. Traditional non-rigid registration methods are generally computationally intense and time-consuming. Deep learning approaches are promising in achieving high accuracy with fast speed, but have yet been investigated with consideration for tracer distribution changes or in the whole-body scope. In this work, we developed an unsupervised automatic deep learning-based framework to correct inter-frame body motion. The motion estimation network is a convolutional neural network with a c…
Background: A crucial initial processing step for quantitative PET/CT analysis is the segmentation of tumor lesions enabling accurate feature ex-traction, tumor characterization, oncologic staging, and image-based therapy response assessment. Manual lesion segmentation is however associated with enormous effort and cost and is thus infeasible in clinical routine. Goal: The goal of this study was to report the performance of a deep neural network designed to automatically segment regions suspected of cancer in whole-body 18F-FDG PET/CT images in the context of the AutoPET challenge. Method: A c…
General Electric Healthcare（通用电气医疗集团）；University of Rouen（鲁昂大学）；Henri Becquerel Center（亨利·贝克勒尔中心）
One of the most challenges in medical imaging is the lack of data. It is proven that classical data augmentation methods are useful but still limited due to the huge variation in images. Using generative adversarial networks (GAN) is a promising way to address this problem, however, it is challenging to train one model to generate different classes of lesions. In this paper, we propose a deep convolutional conditional generative adversarial network to generate MIP positron emission tomography image (PET) which is a 2D image that represents a 3D volume for fast interpretation, according to diff…
University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学）；Medical Center – University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学医学中心）；Faculty of Medicine, University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学医学院）；German Cancer Consortium (DKTK)（德国癌症联盟）；Medical School of Nanjing University（南京大学医学院）；Affiliated Drum Tower Hospital（鼓楼医院）；Hannover Medical School（汉诺威医学院）；Institute for Surgical Pathology, Medical Center – University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学医学中心外科病理研究所）
Accurate delineation of the intraprostatic gross tumour volume (GTV) is a prerequisite for treatment approaches in patients with primary prostate cancer (PCa). Prostate-specific membrane antigen positron emission tomography (PSMA-PET) may outperform MRI in GTV detection. However, visual GTV delineation underlies interobserver heterogeneity and is time consuming. The aim of this study was to develop a convolutional neural network (CNN) for automated segmentation of intraprostatic tumour (GTV-CNN) in PSMA-PET. Methods: The CNN (3D U-Net) was trained on [68Ga]PSMA-PET images of 152 patients from …
Cycle-Constrained Adversarial Denoising Convolutional Network for PET Image Denoising: Multi-Dimensional Validation on Large Datasets with Reader Study and Real Low-Dose Data
Leiden University Medical Center（莱顿大学医学中心）；Philips（飞利浦）；Amsterdam University Medical Center（阿姆斯特丹大学医学中心）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is an imaging method that can assess physiological function rather than structural disturbances by measuring cerebral perfusion or glucose consumption. However, this imaging technique relies on injection of radioactive tracers and is expensive. On the contrary, Arterial Spin Labeling (ASL) MRI is a non-invasive, non-radioactive, and relatively cheap imaging technique for brain hemodynamic measurements, which allows quantification to some extent. In this paper we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) based model for translating ASL to PET images, which …
Physics-Constrained Diffusion Reconstruction with Posterior Correction for Quantitative and Fast PET Imaging
Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学）；Beijing Friendship Hospital, Capital Medical University（首都医科大学北京友谊医院）；The First Affiliated Hospital of USTC, Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学生命科学与医学部附属第一医院）；Jiangnan University（江南大学）；University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）
Marquette University（马凯特大学）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）
This work proposes a novel framework for visual tracking based on the integration of an iterative particle filter, a deep convolutional neural network, and a correlation filter. The iterative particle filter enables the particles to correct themselves and converge to the correct target position. We employ a novel strategy to assess the likelihood of the particles after the iterations by applying K-means clustering. Our approach ensures a consistent support for the posterior distribution. Thus, we do not need to perform resampling at every video frame, improving the utilization of prior distrib…
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success for single image super-resolution (SISR) task due to their powerful feature representation capabilities. The most recent deep learning based SISR methods focus on designing deeper / wider models to learn the non-linear mapping between low-resolution (LR) inputs and high-resolution (HR) outputs. These existing SR methods do not take into account the image observation (physical) model and thus require a large number of network's trainable parameters with a great volume of training data. To address these issues, we pro…
São Paulo State University（圣保罗州立大学）；Petroleo Brasileiro S.A. - Petrobras（巴西石油公司）
Video segmentation consists of a frame-by-frame selection process of meaningful areas related to foreground moving objects. Some applications include traffic monitoring, human tracking, action recognition, efficient video surveillance, and anomaly detection. In these applications, it is not rare to face challenges such as abrupt changes in weather conditions, illumination issues, shadows, subtle dynamic background motions, and also camouflage effects. In this work, we address such shortcomings by proposing a novel deep learning video segmentation approach that incorporates residual information…
Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt（德国联邦物理技术研究院）；Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin（柏林夏里特医学院）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；Technical University of Berlin（柏林工业大学）；University of Innsbruck（因斯布鲁克大学）
The concept of sparsity has been extensively applied for regularization in image reconstruction. Typically, sparsifying transforms are either pre-trained on ground-truth images or adaptively trained during the reconstruction. Thereby, learning algorithms are designed to minimize some target function which encodes the desired properties of the transform. However, this procedure ignores the subsequently employed reconstruction algorithm as well as the physical model which is responsible for the image formation process. Iterative neural networks - which contain the physical model - can overcome t…
The integration of Time-of-Flight (TOF) information in the reconstruction process of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) yields improved image properties. However, implementing the cutting-edge model-based deep learning methods for TOF-PET reconstruction is challenging due to the substantial memory requirements. In this study, we present a novel model-based deep learning approach, LMPDNet, for TOF-PET reconstruction from list-mode data. We address the issue of real-time parallel computation of the projection matrix for list-mode data, and propose an iterative model-based module that utilizes a …
Deep convolutional neural networks contain tens of millions of parameters, making them impossible to work efficiently on embedded devices. We propose iterative approach of applying low-rank approximation to compress deep convolutional neural networks. Since classification and object detection are the most favored tasks for embedded devices, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by compressing AlexNet, VGG-16, YOLOv2 and Tiny YOLO networks. Our results show the superiority of the proposed method compared to non-repetitive ones. We demonstrate higher compression ratio providing less a…
University Medical Center Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心）；Radboud University Medical Center Nijmegen（奈梅亨拉德堡德大学医学中心）；Utrecht University（乌得勒支大学）
Precise segmentation and anatomical identification of the vertebrae provides the basis for automatic analysis of the spine, such as detection of vertebral compression fractures or other abnormalities. Most dedicated spine CT and MR scans as well as scans of the chest, abdomen or neck cover only part of the spine. Segmentation and identification should therefore not rely on the visibility of certain vertebrae or a certain number of vertebrae. We propose an iterative instance segmentation approach that uses a fully convolutional neural network to segment and label vertebrae one after the other, …
Lehigh University（里海大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Identification of brain regions related to the specific neurological disorders are of great importance for biomarker and diagnostic studies. In this paper, we propose an interpretable Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) framework for the identification and classification of Alzheimer's disease (AD) using multi-modality brain imaging data. Specifically, we extended the Gradient Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) technique to quantify the most discriminative features identified by GCN from brain connectivity patterns. We then utilized them to find signature regions of interest (ROIs) by detecting…
University of California Davis Health（加州大学戴维斯分校健康中心）
Image reconstruction for positron emission tomography (PET) is challenging because of the ill-conditioned tomographic problem and low counting statistics. Kernel methods address this challenge by using kernel representation to incorporate image prior information in the forward model of iterative PET image reconstruction. Existing kernel methods construct the kernels commonly using an empirical process, which may lead to unsatisfactory performance. In this paper, we describe the equivalence between the kernel representation and a trainable neural network model. A deep kernel method is then prop…
Contrastive Diffusion Model with Auxiliary Guidance for Coarse-to-Fine PET Reconstruction
Sichuan University（四川大学）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Chengdu University of Information Technology（成都信息工程大学）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shanghai United Imaging Intelligence Co., Ltd.（上海联影智能科技有限公司）
针对低剂量 PET 重建中扩散模型采样慢、条件对应保持不足的问题，提出由 CPM 与 IRM 构成的由粗到细框架，并引入辅助引导和对比扩散策略，提升速度、重建质量及临床可靠性。
Synthesizing CT from Ultrashort Echo-Time MR Images via Convolutional Neural Networks
Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine, Henry Jackson Foundation（亨利·杰克逊基金会神经科学与再生医学中心）；Clinical Center, National Institute of Health（美国国立卫生研究院临床中心）
With the increase of structure complexity, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) take a fair amount of computation cost. Meanwhile, existing research reveals the salient parameter redundancy in CNNs. The current pruning methods can compress CNNs with little performance drop, but when the pruning ratio increases, the accuracy loss is more serious. Moreover, some iterative pruning methods are difficult to accurately identify and delete unimportant parameters due to the accuracy drop during pruning. We propose a novel adversarial iterative pruning method (AIP) for CNNs based on knowledge transfer.…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
Automatic segmentation of head and neck tumors plays an important role in radiomics analysis. In this short paper, we propose an automatic segmentation method for head and neck tumors from PET and CT images based on the combination of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and hybrid active contours. Specifically, we first introduce a multi-channel 3D U-Net to segment the tumor with the concatenated PET and CT images. Then, we estimate the segmentation uncertainty by model ensembles and define a segmentation quality score to select the cases with high uncertainties. Finally, we develop a hybrid …
Gordon Center for Medical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院麻省总医院戈登医学成像中心）；Center for Advanced Medical Computing and Analysis, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院麻省总医院高级医学计算与分析中心）；University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center（德克萨斯大学MD安德森癌症中心）
Due to various physical degradation factors and limited counts received, PET image quality needs further improvements. The denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM) are distribution learning-based models, which try to transform a normal distribution into a specific data distribution based on iterative refinements. In this work, we proposed and evaluated different DDPM-based methods for PET image denoising. Under the DDPM framework, one way to perform PET image denoising is to provide the PET image and/or the prior image as the network input. Another way is to supply the prior image as th…
Modern digital cameras and smartphones mostly rely on image signal processing (ISP) pipelines to produce realistic colored RGB images. However, compared to DSLR cameras, low-quality images are usually obtained in many portable mobile devices with compact camera sensors due to their physical limitations. The low-quality images have multiple degradations i.e., sub-pixel shift due to camera motion, mosaick patterns due to camera color filter array, low-resolution due to smaller camera sensors, and the rest information are corrupted by the noise. Such degradations limit the performance of current …
University of California Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；Duke University Medical Center（杜克大学医学中心）
This paper develops a method of biologically guided deep learning for post-radiation FDG-PET image outcome prediction based on pre-radiation images and radiotherapy dose information. Based on the classic reaction-diffusion mechanism, a novel biological model was proposed using a partial differential equation that incorporates spatial radiation dose distribution as a patient-specific treatment information variable. A 7-layer encoder-decoder-based convolutional neural network (CNN) was designed and trained to learn the proposed biological model. As such, the model could generate post-radiation F…
University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Royal Prince Alfred Hospital（皇家阿尔弗雷德王子医院）
Sequential whole-body 18F-Fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) positron emission tomography (PET) scans are regarded as the imaging modality of choice for the assessment of treatment response in the lymphomas because they detect treatment response when there may not be changes on anatomical imaging. Any computerized analysis of lymphomas in whole-body PET requires automatic segmentation of the studies so that sites of disease can be quantitatively monitored over time. State-of-the-art PET image segmentation methods are based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) given their ability to leverage annotated…
King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
The ability to synthesise Computed Tomography images - commonly known as pseudo CT, or pCT - from MRI input data is commonly assessed using an intensity-wise similarity, such as an L2-norm between the ground truth CT and the pCT. However, given that the ultimate purpose is often to use the pCT as an attenuation map ($μ$-map) in Positron Emission Tomography Magnetic Resonance Imaging (PET/MRI), minimising the error between pCT and CT is not necessarily optimal. The main objective should be to predict a pCT that, when used as $μ$-map, reconstructs a pseudo PET (pPET) which is as close as possibl…
Universitat de Valencia（瓦伦西亚大学）；Université Grenoble Alpes（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学）；University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）
In this paper we elaborate an extension of rotation-based iterative Gaussianization, RBIG, which makes image Gaussianization possible. Although RBIG has been successfully applied to many tasks, it is limited to medium dimensionality data (on the order of a thousand dimensions). In images its application has been restricted to small image patches or isolated pixels, because rotation in RBIG is based on principal or independent component analysis and these transformations are difficult to learn and scale. Here we present the \emph{Convolutional RBIG}: an extension that alleviates this issue by i…
University of California Davis Health（加州大学戴维斯分校医疗中心）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；University of California at Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）
Image reconstruction of low-count positron emission tomography (PET) data is challenging. Kernel methods address the challenge by incorporating image prior information in the forward model of iterative PET image reconstruction. The kernelized expectation-maximization (KEM) algorithm has been developed and demonstrated to be effective and easy to implement. A common approach for a further improvement of the kernel method would be adding an explicit regularization, which however leads to a complex optimization problem. In this paper, we propose an implicit regularization for the kernel method by…
Training of convolutional neural networks for semantic segmentation requires accurate pixel-wise labeling which requires large amounts of human effort. The human-in-the-loop method reduces labeling effort; however, it requires human intervention for each image. This paper describes a general iterative training methodology for semantic segmentation, Automating-the-Loop. This aims to replicate the manual adjustments of the human-in-the-loop method with an automated process, hence, drastically reducing labeling effort. Using the application of detecting partially occluded apple tree segmentation,…
