507 research outputs found
Joint Total Variation ESTATICS for Robust Multi-Parameter Mapping
Quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (qMRI) derives tissue-specific
parameters -- such as the apparent transverse relaxation rate R2*, the
longitudinal relaxation rate R1 and the magnetisation transfer saturation --
that can be compared across sites and scanners and carry important information
about the underlying microstructure. The multi-parameter mapping (MPM) protocol
takes advantage of multi-echo acquisitions with variable flip angles to extract
these parameters in a clinically acceptable scan time. In this context,
ESTATICS performs a joint loglinear fit of multiple echo series to extract R2*
and multiple extrapolated intercepts, thereby improving robustness to motion
and decreasing the variance of the estimators. In this paper, we extend this
model in two ways: (1) by introducing a joint total variation (JTV) prior on
the intercepts and decay, and (2) by deriving a nonlinear maximum \emph{a
posteriori} estimate. We evaluated the proposed algorithm by predicting
left-out echoes in a rich single-subject dataset. In this validation, we
outperformed other state-of-the-art methods and additionally showed that the
proposed approach greatly reduces the variance of the estimated maps, without
introducing bias.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, conference paper, accepted at MICCAI
202
Improving Fiber Alignment in HARDI by Combining Contextual PDE Flow with Constrained Spherical Deconvolution
We propose two strategies to improve the quality of tractography results
computed from diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI) data. Both
methods are based on the same PDE framework, defined in the coupled space of
positions and orientations, associated with a stochastic process describing the
enhancement of elongated structures while preserving crossing structures. In
the first method we use the enhancement PDE for contextual regularization of a
fiber orientation distribution (FOD) that is obtained on individual voxels from
high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) data via constrained
spherical deconvolution (CSD). Thereby we improve the FOD as input for
subsequent tractography. Secondly, we introduce the fiber to bundle coherence
(FBC), a measure for quantification of fiber alignment. The FBC is computed
from a tractography result using the same PDE framework and provides a
criterion for removing the spurious fibers. We validate the proposed
combination of CSD and enhancement on phantom data and on human data, acquired
with different scanning protocols. On the phantom data we find that PDE
enhancements improve both local metrics and global metrics of tractography
results, compared to CSD without enhancements. On the human data we show that
the enhancements allow for a better reconstruction of crossing fiber bundles
and they reduce the variability of the tractography output with respect to the
acquisition parameters. Finally, we show that both the enhancement of the FODs
and the use of the FBC measure on the tractography improve the stability with
respect to different stochastic realizations of probabilistic tractography.
This is shown in a clinical application: the reconstruction of the optic
radiation for epilepsy surgery planning
Model-based multi-parameter mapping
Quantitative MR imaging is increasingly favoured for its richer information
content and standardised measures. However, computing quantitative parameter
maps, such as those encoding longitudinal relaxation rate (R1), apparent
transverse relaxation rate (R2*) or magnetisation-transfer saturation (MTsat),
involves inverting a highly non-linear function. Many methods for deriving
parameter maps assume perfect measurements and do not consider how noise is
propagated through the estimation procedure, resulting in needlessly noisy
maps. Instead, we propose a probabilistic generative (forward) model of the
entire dataset, which is formulated and inverted to jointly recover (log)
parameter maps with a well-defined probabilistic interpretation (e.g., maximum
likelihood or maximum a posteriori). The second order optimisation we propose
for model fitting achieves rapid and stable convergence thanks to a novel
approximate Hessian. We demonstrate the utility of our flexible framework in
the context of recovering more accurate maps from data acquired using the
popular multi-parameter mapping protocol. We also show how to incorporate a
joint total variation prior to further decrease the noise in the maps, noting
that the probabilistic formulation allows the uncertainty on the recovered
parameter maps to be estimated. Our implementation uses a PyTorch backend and
benefits from GPU acceleration. It is available at
https://github.com/balbasty/nitorch.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures, accepted at Medical Image Analysi
MR image reconstruction using deep density priors
Algorithms for Magnetic Resonance (MR) image reconstruction from undersampled
measurements exploit prior information to compensate for missing k-space data.
Deep learning (DL) provides a powerful framework for extracting such
information from existing image datasets, through learning, and then using it
for reconstruction. Leveraging this, recent methods employed DL to learn
mappings from undersampled to fully sampled images using paired datasets,
including undersampled and corresponding fully sampled images, integrating
prior knowledge implicitly. In this article, we propose an alternative approach
that learns the probability distribution of fully sampled MR images using
unsupervised DL, specifically Variational Autoencoders (VAE), and use this as
an explicit prior term in reconstruction, completely decoupling the encoding
operation from the prior. The resulting reconstruction algorithm enjoys a
powerful image prior to compensate for missing k-space data without requiring
paired datasets for training nor being prone to associated sensitivities, such
as deviations in undersampling patterns used in training and test time or coil
settings. We evaluated the proposed method with T1 weighted images from a
publicly available dataset, multi-coil complex images acquired from healthy
volunteers (N=8) and images with white matter lesions. The proposed algorithm,
using the VAE prior, produced visually high quality reconstructions and
achieved low RMSE values, outperforming most of the alternative methods on the
same dataset. On multi-coil complex data, the algorithm yielded accurate
magnitude and phase reconstruction results. In the experiments on images with
white matter lesions, the method faithfully reconstructed the lesions.
Keywords: Reconstruction, MRI, prior probability, machine learning, deep
learning, unsupervised learning, density estimationComment: Published in IEEE TMI. Main text and supplementary material, 19 pages
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