Artifacts are a common occurrence in Diffusion MRI (dMRI) scans. Identifying and removing them is essential to ensure the accuracy and viability of any post processing carried out on these scans. This makes QC (quality control) a crucial first step prior to any analysis of dMRI data. Several QC methods for artifact detection exist, however they suffer from problems like requiring manual intervention and the inability to generalize across different artifacts and datasets. In this paper, we propose an automated deep learning (DL) pipeline that utilizes a 3D-Densenet architecture to train a model on diffusion volumes for automatic artifact detection. Our method is applied on a vast dataset consisting of 9000 volumes sourced from 7 large clinical datasets. These datasets comprise scans from multiple scanners with different gradient directions, high and low b values, single shell and multi shell acquisitions. Additionally, they represent diverse subject demographics like the presence or absence of pathologies. Our QC method is found to accurately generalize across this heterogenous data by correctly detecting 92% artifacts on average across our test set. This consistent performance over diverse datasets underlines the generalizability of our method, which currently is a significant barrier hindering the widespread adoption of automated QC techniques. For these reasons, we believe that 3D-QCNet can be integrated in diffusion pipelines to effectively automate the arduous and time-intensive process of artifact detection.
For several years, numerous attempts have been made to reduce noise and artifacts in MRI. Although there have been many successful methods to address these problems, practical implementation for clinical images is still challenging because of its complicated mechanism. Recently, deep learning received considerable attention, emerging as a machine learning approach in delivering robust MR image processing. The purpose here is therefore to explore further and review noise and artifact reduction using deep learning for MRI.
Yonsei University（延世大学）；GE Healthcare（通用电气医疗）；Seoul National University Hospital（首尔大学医院）
In this paper, we develop an efficient retrospective deep learning method called stacked U-Nets with self-assisted priors to address the problem of rigid motion artifacts in MRI. The proposed work exploits the usage of additional knowledge priors from the corrupted images themselves without the need for additional contrast data. The proposed network learns missed structural details through sharing auxiliary information from the contiguous slices of the same distorted subject. We further design a refinement stacked U-Nets that facilitates preserving of the image spatial details and hence improv…
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…
KTH Royal Institute of Technology（KTH皇家理工学院）；Science for Life Laboratory（生命科学实验室）
Artifacts on magnetic resonance scans are a serious challenge for both radiologists and computer-aided diagnosis systems. Most commonly, artifacts are caused by motion of the patients, but can also arise from device-specific abnormalities such as noise patterns. Irrespective of the source, artifacts can not only render a scan useless, but can potentially induce misdiagnoses if left unnoticed. For instance, an artifact may masquerade as a tumor or other abnormality. Retrospective artifact correction (RAC) is concerned with removing artifacts after the scan has already been taken. In this work, …
MIT（麻省理工学院）；Boston Children’s Hospital（波士顿儿童医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
Fetal MRI is heavily constrained by unpredictable and substantial fetal motion that causes image artifacts and limits the set of viable diagnostic image contrasts. Current mitigation of motion artifacts is predominantly performed by fast, single-shot MRI and retrospective motion correction. Estimation of fetal pose in real time during MRI stands to benefit prospective methods to detect and mitigate fetal motion artifacts where inferred fetal motion is combined with online slice prescription with low-latency decision making. Current developments of deep reinforcement learning (DRL), offer a nov…
University of Maryland School of Medicine（马里兰大学医学院）；Pacific Northwest National Laboratory（太平洋西北国家实验室）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）
Purpose To develop and evaluate a deep learning-based method (MC-Net) to suppress motion artifacts in brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Methods MC-Net was derived from a UNet combined with a two-stage multi-loss function. T1-weighted axial brain images contaminated with synthetic motions were used to train the network. Evaluation used simulated T1 and T2-weighted axial, coronal, and sagittal images unseen during training, as well as T1-weighted images with motion artifacts from real scans. Performance indices included the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index mea…
Anatomically Faithful Artifact Suppression in SENSE Accelerated Brain MRI
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Affiliated Hospital of Guizhou Medical University（贵州医科大学附属医院）；West China Hospital, Sichuan University（四川大学华西医院）；Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences（中国医学科学院）；RadioDynamic Medical（镭动医疗）；Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital（露西尔·帕卡德儿童医院）
Purpose: To improve the quality of images obtained via dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) that include motion artifacts and blurring using a deep learning approach. Methods: A multi-channel convolutional neural network (MARC) based method is proposed for reducing the motion artifacts and blurring caused by respiratory motion in images obtained via DCE-MRI of the liver. The training datasets for the neural network included images with and without respiration-induced motion artifacts or blurring, and the distortions were generated by simulating the phase error in k-space. Patient studies we…
Reconstruction of Cardiac Cine MRI Using Motion-Guided Deformable Alignment and Multi-Resolution Fusion
School of Health Science and Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology（上海理工大学健康科学与工程学院）；ToolSensing Technologies Co., Ltd（拓深科技有限公司）；School of Medical Instruments, Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences（上海健康医学院医疗器械学院）；Shanghai Key Laboratory of Multidimensional Information Processing, School of Communication & Electronic Engineering, East China Normal University（华东师范大学通信与电子工程学院多维信息处理上海重点实验室）
Philips Healthcare（飞利浦医疗）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Patient motion during the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) acquisition process results in motion artifacts, which limits the ability of radiologists to provide a quantitative assessment of a condition visualized. Often times, radiologists either "see through" the artifacts with reduced diagnostic confidence, or the MR scans are rejected and patients are asked to be recalled and re-scanned. Presently, there are many published approaches that focus on MRI artifact detection and correction. However, the key question of the bias exhibited by these algorithms on motion corrupted MRI images is still…
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
MRI with multiple protocols is commonly used for diagnosis, but it suffers from a long acquisition time, which yields the image quality vulnerable to say motion artifacts. To accelerate, various methods have been proposed to reconstruct full images from under-sampled k-space data. However, these algorithms are inadequate for two main reasons. Firstly, aliasing artifacts generated in the image domain are structural and non-local, so that sole image domain restoration is insufficient. Secondly, though MRI comprises multiple protocols during one exam, almost all previous studies only employ the r…
University Medical Center Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心）；Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital（威廉明娜儿童医院）；Utrecht University（乌得勒支大学）
MR images of fetuses allow clinicians to detect brain abnormalities in an early stage of development. The cornerstone of volumetric and morphologic analysis in fetal MRI is segmentation of the fetal brain into different tissue classes. Manual segmentation is cumbersome and time consuming, hence automatic segmentation could substantially simplify the procedure. However, automatic brain tissue segmentation in these scans is challenging owing to artifacts including intensity inhomogeneity, caused in particular by spontaneous fetal movements during the scan. Unlike methods that estimate the bias f…
Removing Motion Artifact in MRI by Using a Perceptual Loss Driven Deep Learning Framework
Institute of Magnetic Resonance and Molecular Imaging in Medicine（医学磁共振与分子成像研究所）；Shanghai Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance（上海磁共振重点实验室）；The First Affiliated Hospital of Naval Medical University Department of Radiology（海军医学院第一附属医院放射科）；Laboratory for Intelligent Medical Imaging（智能医学成像实验室）；Tsinghua Cross-Strait Research Institute（清华大学海峡研究院）；RadioDynamic Medical（RadioDynamic医疗）
Parallel imaging is a widely-used technique to accelerate magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, current methods still perform poorly in reconstructing artifact-free MRI images from highly undersampled k-space data. Recently, implicit neural representation (INR) has emerged as a new deep learning paradigm for learning the internal continuity of an object. In this study, we adopted INR to parallel MRI reconstruction. The MRI image was modeled as a continuous function of spatial coordinates. This function was parameterized by a neural network and learned directly from the measured k-space it…
The volume estimation of brain regions from MRI data is a key problem in many clinical applications, where the acquisition of data at high spatial resolution is desirable. While parallel MRI and constrained image reconstruction algorithms can accelerate the scans, image reconstruction artifacts are inevitable, especially at high acceleration factors. We introduce a novel image domain deep-learning framework for calibrationless parallel MRI reconstruction, coupled with a segmentation network to improve image quality and to reduce the vulnerability of current segmentation algorithms to image art…
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…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Sunnybrook Research Institute（桑尼布鲁克研究所）；Western University（西部大学）
Deep artificial neural networks (DNNs) have moved to the forefront of medical image analysis due to their success in classification, segmentation, and detection challenges. A principal challenge in large-scale deployment of DNNs in neuroimage analysis is the potential for shifts in signal-to-noise ratio, contrast, resolution, and presence of artifacts from site to site due to variances in scanners and acquisition protocols. DNNs are famously susceptible to these distribution shifts in computer vision. Currently, there are no benchmarking platforms or frameworks to assess the robustness of new …
Deep learning based on unrolled algorithm has served as an effective method for accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, many methods ignore the direct use of edge information to assist MRI reconstruction. In this work, we present the edge-weighted pFISTA-Net that directly applies the detected edge map to the soft-thresholding part of pFISTA-Net. The soft-thresholding value of different regions will be adjusted according to the edge map. Experimental results of a public brain dataset show that the proposed yields reconstructions with lower error and better artifact suppression co…
Physics-informed Deep Diffusion MRI Reconstruction with Synthetic Data: Break Training Data Bottleneck in Artificial Intelligence
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Plasma and Magnetic Resonance, Xiamen University-Neusoft Medical Magnetic Resonance Imaging Joint Research and Development Center, Xiamen University（福建省等离子体与磁共振重点实验室、厦门大学-东软医疗磁共振成像联合研发中心、厦门大学）；Henan Provincial People's Hospital & the People's Hospital of Zhengzhou University（河南省人民医院暨郑州大学人民医院）；Human Phenome Institute, Fudan University（复旦大学人类表型组研究院）；United Imaging Healthcare（联影医疗）；Philips Healthcare（飞利浦医疗）；Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University (Xiamen Branch)（复旦大学附属中山医院（厦门分院））；Zhongshan Hospital Affiliated to Xiamen University（厦门大学附属中山医院）；Shandong Provincial Hospital Affiliated to Shandong First Medical University（山东第一医科大学附属山东省立医院）；Department of Neurosurgery, Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University (Xiamen Branch)（复旦大学附属中山医院（厦门分院）神经外科）；Department of Neurology, Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University（复旦大学附属中山医院神经内科）；Department of Applied Marine Physics and Engineering, Xiamen University（厦门大学应用海洋物理与工程系）；School of Computer and Information Engineering, Xiamen University of Technology（厦门理工学院计算机与信息工程学院）；Biomedical Research Institute, Henan Academy of Sciences（河南省科学院生物医学研究所）
Deep Learning Assisted Outer Volume Removal for Highly-Accelerated Real-Time Dynamic MRI
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota（电气与计算机工程系，明尼苏达大学）；Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, University of Minnesota（磁共振研究中心，明尼苏达大学）；Department of Imaging Physics, Delft University of Technology（成像物理系，代尔夫特理工大学）；HollandPTC, Delft, the Netherlands（HollandPTC，代尔夫特，荷兰）
Interpretable Motion Artificat Detection in structural Brain MRI
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras（印度理工学院，马德拉斯）；Boston Childrens Hospital, Harvard Medical School（波士顿儿童医院，哈佛医学院）；Indian Institute of Technology, Bhilai（印度理工学院，比哈尔）
Sparsity-Driven Parallel Imaging Consistency for Improved Self-Supervised MRI Reconstruction
Department of Electrical \& Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota, MN, USA Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, University of Minnesota, MN, USA
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）；Korea Basic Science Institute（韩国基础科学研究所）
Accelerated magnetic resonance (MR) scan acquisition with compressed sensing (CS) and parallel imaging is a powerful method to reduce MR imaging scan time. However, many reconstruction algorithms have high computational costs. To address this, we investigate deep residual learning networks to remove aliasing artifacts from artifact corrupted images. The proposed deep residual learning networks are composed of magnitude and phase networks that are separately trained. If both phase and magnitude information are available, the proposed algorithm can work as an iterative k-space interpolation algo…
MIT（麻省理工学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Boston Children’s Hospital（波士顿儿童医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
The performance and diagnostic utility of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in pregnancy is fundamentally constrained by fetal motion. Motion of the fetus, which is unpredictable and rapid on the scale of conventional imaging times, limits the set of viable acquisition techniques to single-shot imaging with severe compromises in signal-to-noise ratio and diagnostic contrast, and frequently results in unacceptable image quality. Surprisingly little is known about the characteristics of fetal motion during MRI and here we propose and demonstrate methods that exploit a growing repository of MRI ob…
Escola Politécnica, Universidade de São Paulo（圣保罗大学理工学院）；Brain Institute, IIEP Albert Einstein（阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦教育与研究学院脑研究所）；Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo（圣保罗大学医学院）；University of California San Francisco（加州大学旧金山分校）；University of Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学）；Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, MGH/HST（麻省总医院/哈佛-麻省理工健康科学与技术部阿西诺拉·A·马丁诺斯生物医学成像中心）
Although the latest advances in MRI technology have allowed the acquisition of higher resolution images, reliable delineation of cytoarchitectural or subcortical nuclei boundaries is not possible. As a result, histological images are still required to identify the exact limits of neuroanatomical structures. However, histological processing is associated with tissue distortion and fixation artifacts, which prevent a direct comparison between the two modalities. Our group has previously proposed a histological procedure based on celloidin embedding that reduces the amount of artifacts and yields…
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is one of the most commonly applied tests in neurology and neurosurgery. However, the utility of MRI is largely limited by its long acquisition time, which might induce many problems including patient discomfort and motion artifacts. Acquiring fewer k-space sampling is a potential solution to reducing the total scanning time. However, it can lead to severe aliasing reconstruction artifacts and thus affect the clinical diagnosis. Nowadays, deep learning has provided new insights into the sparse reconstruction of MRI. In this paper, we present a new approach to t…
National Tsing Hua University（清华大学）；University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital（广东省人民医院）；Guangdong Acadamic of Medical Science（广东医学科学院）
Medical images may contain various types of artifacts with different patterns and mixtures, which depend on many factors such as scan setting, machine condition, patients' characteristics, surrounding environment, etc. However, existing deep-learning-based artifact reduction methods are restricted by their training set with specific predetermined artifact types and patterns. As such, they have limited clinical adoption. In this paper, we introduce One-Shot medical image Artifact Reduction (OSAR), which exploits the power of deep learning but without using pre-trained general networks. Specific…
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国学院）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Fetal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is used in prenatal diagnosis and to assess early brain development. Accurate segmentation of the different brain tissues is a vital step in several brain analysis tasks, such as cortical surface reconstruction and tissue thickness measurements. Fetal MRI scans, however, are prone to motion artifacts that can affect the correctness of both manual and automatic segmentation techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel network structure that can simultaneously generate conditional atlases and predict brain tissue segmentation, called CAS-Net. The condition…
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-…
Improving Quality Control Of MRI Images Using Synthetic Motion Data
Mass General Brigham（麻省总医院布列根医疗系统）；Washington University（华盛顿大学）；UCLA（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Orygen；Mt Sinai（西奈山医院）；Northwell Health（诺斯韦尔医疗）；Yale（耶鲁大学）；University of Calgary（卡尔加里大学）；Mila（米拉人工智能研究所）
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Probability calibration for deep models is highly desirable in safety-critical applications such as medical imaging. It makes output probabilities of deep networks interpretable, by aligning prediction probability with the actual accuracy in test data. In image segmentation, well-calibrated probabilities allow radiologists to identify regions where model-predicted segmentations are unreliable. These unreliable predictions often occur to out-of-domain (OOD) images that are caused by imaging artifacts or unseen imaging protocols. Unfortunately, most previous calibration methods for image segment…
On Sensitivity and Robustness of Normalization Schemes to Input Distribution Shifts in Automatic MR Image Diagnosis
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University（纽约大学柯朗数学科学研究所）；New York University Grossman School of Medicine（纽约大学格罗斯曼医学院）；Center for Data Science, New York University（纽约大学数据科学中心）；Prescient Design, Genentech（基因泰克Prescient Design部门）
University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile（智利天主教大学）
Novel Magnetic Resonance (MR) imaging modalities can quantify hemodynamics but require long acquisition times, precluding its widespread use for early diagnosis of cardiovascular disease. To reduce the acquisition times, reconstruction methods from undersampled measurements are routinely used, that leverage representations designed to increase image compressibility. Reconstructed anatomical and hemodynamic images may present visual artifacts. Although some of these artifact are essentially reconstruction errors, and thus a consequence of undersampling, others may be due to measurement noise or…
University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；Center for Magnetic Resonance Research（磁共振研究中心）
Functional MRI (fMRI) is commonly used for interpreting neural activities across the brain. Numerous accelerated fMRI techniques aim to provide improved spatiotemporal resolutions. Among these, simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) imaging has emerged as a powerful strategy, becoming a part of large-scale studies, such as the Human Connectome Project. However, when SMS imaging is combined with in-plane acceleration for higher acceleration rates, conventional SMS reconstruction methods may suffer from noise amplification and other artifacts. Recently, deep learning (DL) techniques have gained interest…
We present a novel algorithm named 3DPIFCM, for automatic segmentation of noisy MRI Brain images. The algorithm is an extension of a well-known IFCM (Improved Fuzzy C-Means) algorithm. It performs fuzzy segmentation and introduces a fitness function that is affected by proximity of the voxels and by the color intensity in 3D images. The 3DPIFCM algorithm uses PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) in order to optimize the fitness function. In addition, the 3DPIFCM uses 3D features of near voxels to better adjust the noisy artifacts. In our experiments, we evaluate 3DPIFCM on T1 Brainweb dataset wit…
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…
