Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has long been considered to be among the gold standards of today's diagnostic imaging. The most significant drawback of MRI is long acquisition times, prohibiting its use in standard practice for some applications. Compressed sensing (CS) proposes to subsample the k-space (the Fourier domain dual to the physical space of spatial coordinates) leading to significantly accelerated acquisition. However, the benefit of compressed sensing has not been fully exploited; most of the sampling densities obtained through CS do not produce a trajectory that obeys the stringent constraints of the MRI machine imposed in practice. Inspired by recent success of deep learning based approaches for image reconstruction and ideas from computational imaging on learning-based design of imaging systems, we introduce 3D FLAT, a novel protocol for data-driven design of 3D non-Cartesian accelerated trajectories in MRI. Our proposal leverages the entire 3D k-space to simultaneously learn a physically feasible acquisition trajectory with a reconstruction method. Experimental results, performed as a proof-of-concept, suggest that 3D FLAT achieves higher image quality for a given readout time compared to standard trajectories such as radial, stack-of-stars, or 2D learned trajectories (trajectories that evolve only in the 2D plane while fully sampling along the third dimension). Furthermore, we demonstrate evidence supporting the significant benefit of performing MRI acquisitions using non-Cartesian 3D trajectories over 2D non-Cartesian trajectories acquired slice-wise.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is considered today the golden-standard modality for soft tissues. The long acquisition times, however, make it more prone to motion artifacts as well as contribute to the relatively high costs of this examination. Over the years, multiple studies concentrated on designing reduced measurement schemes and image reconstruction schemes for MRI, however, these problems have been so far addressed separately. On the other hand, recent works in optical computational imaging have demonstrated growing success of the simultaneous learning-based design of the acquisition …
Unrolled Reconstruction with Integrated Super-Resolution for Accelerated 3D LGE MRI
Kahlert School of Computing, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA Radiology \& Imaging Sciences, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA Cardiology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Dynamic Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is known to be a powerful and reliable technique for the dynamic imaging of internal organs and tissues, making it a leading diagnostic tool. A major difficulty in using MRI in this setting is the relatively long acquisition time (and, hence, increased cost) required for imaging in high spatio-temporal resolution, leading to the appearance of related motion artifacts and decrease in resolution. Compressed Sensing (CS) techniques have become a common tool to reduce MRI acquisition time by subsampling images in the k-space according to some acquisition tr…
Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究）；fastMRI team（fastMRI团队）
Deep learning approaches to accelerated MRI take a matrix of sampled Fourier-space lines as input and produce a spatial image as output. In this work we show that by careful choice of the offset used in the sampling procedure, the symmetries in k-space can be better exploited, producing higher quality reconstructions than given by standard equally-spaced samples or randomized samples motivated by compressed sensing.
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；Hyperfine Research（Hyperfine研究公司）
Multi-contrast MRI (MC-MRI) captures multiple complementary imaging modalities to aid in radiological decision-making. Given the need for lowering the time cost of multiple acquisitions, current deep accelerated MRI reconstruction networks focus on exploiting the redundancy between multiple contrasts. However, existing works are largely supervised with paired data and/or prohibitively expensive fully-sampled MRI sequences. Further, reconstruction networks typically rely on convolutional architectures which are limited in their capacity to model long-range interactions and may lead to suboptima…
Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Accelerated MRI reconstructs images of clinical anatomies from sparsely sampled signal data to reduce patient scan times. While recent works have leveraged deep learning to accomplish this task, such approaches have often only been explored in simulated environments where there is no signal corruption or resource limitations. In this work, we explore augmentations to neural network MRI image reconstructors to enhance their clinical relevancy. Namely, we propose a ConvNet model for detecting sources of image artifacts that achieves a classifier $F_2$ score of 79.1%. We also demonstrate that tra…
Hyperfine Research（Hyperfine研究院）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）；New York University（纽约大学）
While enabling accelerated acquisition and improved reconstruction accuracy, current deep MRI reconstruction networks are typically supervised, require fully sampled data, and are limited to Cartesian sampling patterns. These factors limit their practical adoption as fully-sampled MRI is prohibitively time-consuming to acquire clinically. Further, non-Cartesian sampling patterns are particularly desirable as they are more amenable to acceleration and show improved motion robustness. To this end, we present a fully self-supervised approach for accelerated non-Cartesian MRI reconstruction which …
Unrolled neural networks have enabled state-of-the-art reconstruction performance and fast inference times for the accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction task. However, these approaches depend on fully-sampled scans as ground truth data which is either costly or not possible to acquire in many clinical medical imaging applications; hence, reducing dependence on data is desirable. In this work, we propose modeling the proximal operators of unrolled neural networks with scale-equivariant convolutional neural networks in order to improve the data-efficiency and robustness to …
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
Most current approaches to undersampled multi-coil MRI reconstruction focus on learning the reconstruction model for a fixed, equidistant acquisition trajectory. In this paper, we study the problem of joint learning of the reconstruction model together with acquisition policies. To this end, we extend the End-to-End Variational Network with learnable acquisition policies that can adapt to different data points. We validate our model on a coil-compressed version of the large scale undersampled multi-coil fastMRI dataset using two undersampling factors: $4\times$ and $8\times$. Our experiments s…
Bilkent University（比尔肯特大学）；National Magnetic Resonance Research Center (UMRAM)（国家磁共振研究中心（UMRAM））；Neuroscience Program, Aysel Sabuncu Brain Research Center, Bilkent University（比尔肯特大学艾塞尔·萨本居脑研究中心神经科学项目）
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently found emerging use in accelerated MRI reconstruction. DNNs typically learn data-driven priors from large datasets constituting pairs of undersampled and fully-sampled acquisitions. Acquiring such large datasets, however, might be impractical. To mitigate this limitation, we propose a few-shot learning approach for accelerated MRI that merges subject-driven priors obtained via physical signal models with data-driven priors obtained from a few training samples. Demonstrations on brain MR images from the NYU fastMRI dataset indicate that the proposed appr…
Monash Biomedical Imaging, Monash University（莫纳什大学生物医学成像中心）；Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering, Monash University（莫纳什大学电气与计算机系统工程系）；School of Psychological Sciences, Monash University（莫纳什大学心理科学学院）；Department of Data Science and AI, Monash University（莫纳什大学数据科学与人工智能系）
Global correlations are widely seen in human anatomical structures due to similarity across tissues and bones. These correlations are reflected in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans as a result of close-range proton density and T1/T2 parameters. Furthermore, to achieve accelerated MRI, k-space data are undersampled which causes global aliasing artifacts. Convolutional neural network (CNN) models are widely utilized for accelerated MRI reconstruction, but those models are limited in capturing global correlations due to the intrinsic locality of the convolution operation. The self-attention-…
Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Boston Children’s Hospital（波士顿儿童医院）
Fast data acquisition in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is vastly in demand and scan time directly depends on the number of acquired k-space samples. Conventional MRI reconstruction methods for fast MRI acquisition mostly relied on different regularizers which represent analytical models of sparsity. However, recent data-driven methods based on deep learning has resulted in promising improvements in image reconstruction algorithms. In this paper, we propose a deep plug-and-play prior framework for parallel MRI reconstruction problems which utilize a deep neural network (DNN) as an advanced d…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学）；Northwest University（西北大学）；University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Shanghai United Imaging Intelligence Co., Ltd.（上海联影智能医疗科技有限公司）
Recent studies on T1-assisted MRI reconstruction for under-sampled images of other modalities have demonstrated the potential of further accelerating MRI acquisition of other modalities. Most of the state-of-the-art approaches have achieved improvement through the development of network architectures for fixed under-sampling patterns, without fully exploiting the complementary information between modalities. Although existing under-sampling pattern learning algorithms can be simply modified to allow the fully-sampled T1-weighted MR image to assist the pattern learning, no significant improveme…
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学电气与计算机工程系）
Long scan duration remains a challenge for high-resolution MRI. Deep learning has emerged as a powerful means for accelerated MRI reconstruction by providing data-driven regularizers that are directly learned from data. These data-driven priors typically remain unchanged for future data in the testing phase once they are learned during training. In this study, we propose to use a transfer learning approach to fine-tune these regularizers for new subjects using a self-supervision approach. While the proposed approach can compromise the extremely fast reconstruction time of deep learning MRI met…
A central limitation of multiple-acquisition magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the degradation in scan efficiency as the number of distinct datasets grows. Sparse recovery techniques can alleviate this limitation via randomly undersampled acquisitions. A frequent sampling strategy is to prescribe for each acquisition a different random pattern drawn from a common sampling density. However, naive random patterns often contain gaps or clusters across the acquisition dimension that in turn can degrade reconstruction quality or reduce scan efficiency. To address this problem, a statistically-seg…
Facebook AI Research (FAIR)（Facebook人工智能研究院（FAIR））；NYU School of Medicine（纽约大学医学院）
The slow acquisition speed of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has led to the development of two complementary methods: acquiring multiple views of the anatomy simultaneously (parallel imaging) and acquiring fewer samples than necessary for traditional signal processing methods (compressed sensing). While the combination of these methods has the potential to allow much faster scan times, reconstruction from such undersampled multi-coil data has remained an open problem. In this paper, we present a new approach to this problem that extends previously proposed variational methods by learning ful…
Being able to adequately process and combine data arising from different sites is crucial in neuroimaging, but is difficult, owing to site, sequence and acquisition-parameter dependent biases. It is important therefore to design algorithms that are not only robust to images of differing contrasts, but also be able to generalise well to unseen ones, with a quantifiable measure of uncertainty. In this paper we demonstrate the efficacy of a physics-informed, uncertainty-aware, segmentation network that employs augmentation-time MR simulations and homogeneous batch feature stratification to achiev…
In accelerated MRI reconstruction, the anatomy of a patient is recovered from a set of under-sampled and noisy measurements. Deep learning approaches have been proven to be successful in solving this ill-posed inverse problem and are capable of producing very high quality reconstructions. However, current architectures heavily rely on convolutions, that are content-independent and have difficulties modeling long-range dependencies in images. Recently, Transformers, the workhorse of contemporary natural language processing, have emerged as powerful building blocks for a multitude of vision task…
Bilkent University（比尔肯特大学）；University of Southern California（南加利福尼亚大学）；Hacettepe University（哈杰泰佩大学）
Learning-based synthetic multi-contrast MRI commonly involves deep models trained using high-quality images of source and target contrasts, regardless of whether source and target domain samples are paired or unpaired. This results in undesirable reliance on fully-sampled acquisitions of all MRI contrasts, which might prove impractical due to limitations on scan costs and time. Here, we propose a novel semi-supervised deep generative model that instead learns to recover high-quality target images directly from accelerated acquisitions of source and target contrasts. To achieve this, the propos…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Rice University（莱斯大学）
Deep neural networks have emerged as very successful tools for image restoration and reconstruction tasks. These networks are often trained end-to-end to directly reconstruct an image from a noisy or corrupted measurement of that image. To achieve state-of-the-art performance, training on large and diverse sets of images is considered critical. However, it is often difficult and/or expensive to collect large amounts of training images. Inspired by the success of Data Augmentation (DA) for classification problems, in this paper, we propose a pipeline for data augmentation for accelerated MRI re…
Unrolled neural networks have recently achieved state-of-the-art accelerated MRI reconstruction. These networks unroll iterative optimization algorithms by alternating between physics-based consistency and neural-network based regularization. However, they require several iterations of a large neural network to handle high-dimensional imaging tasks such as 3D MRI. This limits traditional training algorithms based on backpropagation due to prohibitively large memory and compute requirements for calculating gradients and storing intermediate activations. To address this challenge, we propose Gre…
Rice University（莱斯大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are highly effective for image reconstruction problems. Typically, CNNs are trained on large amounts of training images. Recently, however, un-trained CNNs such as the Deep Image Prior and Deep Decoder have achieved excellent performance for image reconstruction problems such as denoising and inpainting, \emph{without using any training data}. Motivated by this development, we address the reconstruction problem arising in accelerated MRI with un-trained neural networks. We propose a highly optimized un-trained recovery approach based on a variation of the D…
Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
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 proto…
Combining multi-site data can strengthen and uncover trends, but is a task that is marred by the influence of site-specific covariates that can bias the data and therefore any downstream analyses. Post-hoc multi-site correction methods exist but have strong assumptions that often do not hold in real-world scenarios. Algorithms should be designed in a way that can account for site-specific effects, such as those that arise from sequence parameter choices, and in instances where generalisation fails, should be able to identify such a failure by means of explicit uncertainty modelling. This body …
CUTE-MRI: Conformalized Uncertainty-based framework for Time-adaptivE MRI
University of Lucerne, Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine（卢塞恩大学健康科学与医学学院）；University of Tübingen, Cluster of Excellence – Machine Learning for Science（图宾根大学卓越中心——科学机器学习）；University Hospital of Tübingen, Medical Image and Data Analysis Lab（图宾根大学医院医学影像与数据分析实验室）
Accelerating magnetic resonance image (MRI) reconstruction process is a challenging ill-posed inverse problem due to the excessive under-sampling operation in k-space. In this paper, we propose a recurrent transformer model, namely ReconFormer, for MRI reconstruction which can iteratively reconstruct high fertility magnetic resonance images from highly under-sampled k-space data. In particular, the proposed architecture is built upon Recurrent Pyramid Transformer Layers (RPTL), which jointly exploits intrinsic multi-scale information at every architecture unit as well as the dependencies of th…
Deep Learning for Accelerated and Robust MRI Reconstruction: a Review
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of Iowa（爱荷华大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Tel Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）；Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has long been considered to be among "the gold standards" of diagnostic medical imaging. The long acquisition times, however, render MRI prone to motion artifacts, let alone their adverse contribution to the relative high costs of MRI examination. Over the last few decades, multiple studies have focused on the development of both physical and post-processing methods for accelerated acquisition of MRI scans. These two approaches, however, have so far been addressed separately. On the other hand, recent works in optical computational imaging have demonstrated gro…
Netherlands Cancer Institute（荷兰癌症研究所）；qurAI group（qurAI团队）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
Magnetic Resonance Imaging can produce detailed images of the anatomy and physiology of the human body that can assist doctors in diagnosing and treating pathologies such as tumours. However, MRI suffers from very long acquisition times that make it susceptible to patient motion artifacts and limit its potential to deliver dynamic treatments. Conventional approaches such as Parallel Imaging and Compressed Sensing allow for an increase in MRI acquisition speed by reconstructing MR images from sub-sampled MRI data acquired using multiple receiver coils. Recent advancements in Deep Learning combi…
Fast Controllable Diffusion Models for Undersampled MRI Reconstruction
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Queensland（昆士兰大学电气工程与计算机科学学院）；School of Mathematics and Physics, University of Queensland（昆士兰大学数学与物理学院）
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Royal Brompton Hospital（皇家布朗普顿医院）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）
The long acquisition time has limited the accessibility of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) because it leads to patient discomfort and motion artifacts. Although several MRI techniques have been proposed to reduce the acquisition time, compressed sensing in magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI) enables fast acquisition without compromising SNR and resolution. However, existing CS-MRI methods suffer from the challenge of aliasing artifacts. This challenge results in the noise-like textures and missing the fine details, thus leading to unsatisfactory reconstruction performance. To tackle this chal…
Machine learning and artificial intelligence have shown remarkable performance in accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Cloud computing technologies have great advantages in building an easily accessible platform to deploy advanced algorithms. In this work, we develop an open-access, easy-to-use and high-performance medical intelligence cloud computing platform (XCloud-pFISTA) to reconstruct MRI images from undersampled k-space data. Two state-of-the-art approaches of the Projected Fast Iterative Soft-Thresholding Algorithm (pFISTA) family have been successfully implemented on the clou…
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉国工程技术大学）
Parallel imaging accelerates MRI data acquisition by acquiring additional sensitivity information with an array of receiver coils, resulting in fewer phase encoding steps. Because of fewer data requirements than parallel imaging, compressed sensing magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI) has gained popularity in the field of medical imaging. Parallel imaging and compressed sensing (CS) both reduce the amount of data captured in the k-space, which speeds up traditional MRI acquisition. As acquisition time is inversely proportional to sample count, forming an image from reduced k-space samples resul…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院（KAIST））；Seoul National University College of Medicine, Seoul National University Bundang Hospital（首尔大学医学院，首尔大学盆唐医院）
Recently, deep learning approaches for accelerated MRI have been extensively studied thanks to their high performance reconstruction in spite of significantly reduced runtime complexity. These neural networks are usually trained in a supervised manner, so matched pairs of subsampled and fully sampled k-space data are required. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to acquire matched fully sampled k-space data, since the acquisition of fully sampled k-space data requires long scan time and often leads to the change of the acquisition protocol. Therefore, unpaired deep learning without matched la…
Retrospective artifact correction (RAC) improves image quality post acquisition and enhances image usability. Recent machine learning driven techniques for RAC are predominantly based on supervised learning and therefore practical utility can be limited as data with paired artifact-free and artifact-corrupted images are typically insufficient or even non-existent. Here we show that unwanted image artifacts can be disentangled and removed from an image via an RAC neural network learned with unpaired data. This implies that our method does not require matching artifact-corrupted data to be eithe…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
Score-based diffusion models provide a powerful way to model images using the gradient of the data distribution. Leveraging the learned score function as a prior, here we introduce a way to sample data from a conditional distribution given the measurements, such that the model can be readily used for solving inverse problems in imaging, especially for accelerated MRI. In short, we train a continuous time-dependent score function with denoising score matching. Then, at the inference stage, we iterate between numerical SDE solver and data consistency projection step to achieve reconstruction. Ou…
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is one of the most flexible and powerful medical imaging modalities. This flexibility does however come at a cost; MRI images acquired at different sites and with different parameters exhibit significant differences in contrast and tissue appearance, resulting in downstream issues when quantifying brain anatomy or the presence of pathology. In this work, we propose to combine multiparametric MRI-based static-equation sequence simulations with segmentation convolutional neural networks (CNN), to make these networks robust to variations in acquisition parameters.…
