Ea-GANs: Edge-Aware Generative Adversarial Networks for Cross-Modality MR Image Synthesis

Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is a widely used medical imaging protocol that can be configured to provide different contrasts between the tissues in human body. By setting different scanning parameters, each MR imaging modality reflects the unique visual characteristic of scanned body part, benefiting the subsequent analysis from multiple perspectives. To utilize the complementary information from multiple imaging modalities, cross-modality MR image synthesis has aroused increasing research interest recently. However, most existing methods only focus on minimizing pixel/voxel-wise intensity difference but ignore the textural details of image content structure, which affects the quality of synthesized images. In this paper, we propose edge-aware generative adversarial networks (Ea-GANs) for cross-modality MR image synthesis. Specifically, we integrate edge information, which reflects the textural structure of image content and depicts the boundaries of different objects in images, to reduce this gap. Corresponding to different learning strategies, two frameworks are proposed, i.e., a generator-induced Ea-GAN (gEa-GAN) and a discriminator-induced Ea-GAN (dEa-GAN). The gEa-GAN incorporates the edge information via its generator, while the dEa-GAN further does this from both the generator and the discriminator so that the edge similarity is also adversarially learned. In addition, the proposed Ea-GANs are 3D-based and utilize hierarchical features to capture contextual information. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed Ea-GANs, especially the dEa-GAN, outperform multiple state-of-the-art methods for cross-modality MR image synthesis in both qualitative and quantitative measures. Moreover, the dEa-GAN also shows excellent generality to generic image synthesis tasks on benchmark datasets about facades, maps, and cityscapes

A Temperature Drift Compensation Method for Pulsed Eddy Current Technology

Pulsed eddy current (PEC) technology is another important non-contact nondestructive testing technology for defect detection. However, the temperature drift of the exciting coil has a considerable influence on the precision of PEC testing. The objective of this study is to investigate the temperature drift effect and reduce its impact. The temperature drift effect is analyzed theoretically and experimentally. The temperature drift effect on the peak-to-peak values of the output signal is investigated, and a temperature compensation method is proposed to reduce the effect of temperature variation. The results show that temperature drift has a negative impact on PEC testing and the temperature compensation method can effectively reduce the effect of temperature drift

Tumor segmentation via multi-modality joint dictionary learning

2018 IEEE. Accurate segmentation of head-and-neck tumor from medical images is crucial for diagnosis and treatment in clinical field. Compared with other types of tumor, the nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) tumor has more complex anatomical structure and often shares similar imaging intensities with the nearby tissues such as brainstem, parotid and lymph, making the segmentation of NPC tumor particularly difficult. In this paper, to take advantage of multi-modality medical information, we propose a multi-modality joint dictionary learning method for NPC tumor segmentation. The tumor segmentation task is formulated as a voxel-wise labeling problem with regard to two classes: NPC tumor and normal tissues. In our method, both the multi-modality samples with CT and MRI images as well as the single-modality samples with only CT or MRI images are effectively utilized to perform joint dictionary learning. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the benchmark method and achieves comparable results with prior NPC segmentation methods

3D conditional generative adversarial networks for high-quality PET image estimation at low dose

2018 Elsevier Inc. Positron emission tomography (PET) is a widely used imaging modality, providing insight into both the biochemical and physiological processes of human body. Usually, a full dose radioactive tracer is required to obtain high-quality PET images for clinical needs. This inevitably raises concerns about potential health hazards. On the other hand, dose reduction may cause the increased noise in the reconstructed PET images, which impacts the image quality to a certain extent. In this paper, in order to reduce the radiation exposure while maintaining the high quality of PET images, we propose a novel method based on 3D conditional generative adversarial networks (3D c-GANs) to estimate the high-quality full-dose PET images from low-dose ones. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) include a generator network and a discriminator network which are trained simultaneously with the goal of one beating the other. Similar to GANs, in the proposed 3D c-GANs, we condition the model on an input low-dose PET image and generate a corresponding output full-dose PET image. Specifically, to render the same underlying information between the low-dose and full-dose PET images, a 3D U-net-like deep architecture which can combine hierarchical features by using skip connection is designed as the generator network to synthesize the full-dose image. In order to guarantee the synthesized PET image to be close to the real one, we take into account of the estimation error loss in addition to the discriminator feedback to train the generator network. Furthermore, a concatenated 3D c-GANs based progressive refinement scheme is also proposed to further improve the quality of estimated images. Validation was done on a real human brain dataset including both the normal subjects and the subjects diagnosed as mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Experimental results show that our proposed 3D c-GANs method outperforms the benchmark methods and achieves much better performance than the state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative measures

3D auto-context-based locality adaptive multi-modality GANs for PET synthesis

Positron emission tomography (PET) has been substantially used recently. To minimize the potential health risk caused by the tracer radiation inherent to PET scans, it is of great interest to synthesize the high-quality PET image from the low-dose one to reduce the radiation exposure. In this paper, we propose a 3D auto-context-based locality adaptive multi-modality generative adversarial networks model (LA-GANs) to synthesize the high-quality FDG PET image from the low-dose one with the accompanying MRI images that provide anatomical information. Our work has four contributions. First, different from the traditional methods that treat each image modality as an input channel and apply the same kernel to convolve the whole image, we argue that the contributions of different modalities could vary at different image locations, and therefore a unified kernel for a whole image is not optimal. To address this issue, we propose a locality adaptive strategy for multi-modality fusion. Second, we utilize 1×1×1 kernel to learn this locality adaptive fusion so that the number of additional parameters incurred by our method is kept minimum. Third, the proposed locality adaptive fusion mechanism is learned jointly with the PET image synthesis in a 3D conditional GANs model, which generates high-quality PET images by employing large-sized image patches and hierarchical features. Fourth, we apply the auto-context strategy to our scheme and propose an auto-context LA-GANs model to further refine the quality of synthesized images. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the traditional multi-modality fusion methods used in deep networks, as well as the state-of-the-art PET estimation approaches

Locality adaptive multi-modality GANs for high-quality PET image synthesis

Positron emission topography (PET) has been substantially used in recent years. To minimize the potential health risks caused by the tracer radiation inherent to PET scans, it is of great interest to synthesize the high-quality full-dose PET image from the low-dose one to reduce the radiation exposure while maintaining the image quality. In this paper, we propose a locality adaptive multi-modality generative adversarial networks model (LA-GANs) to synthesize the full-dose PET image from both the low-dose one and the accompanying T1-weighted MRI to incorporate anatomical information for better PET image synthesis. This paper has the following contributions. First, we propose a new mechanism to fuse multi-modality information in deep neural networks. Different from the traditional methods that treat each image modality as an input channel and apply the same kernel to convolute the whole image, we argue that the contributions of different modalities could vary at different image locations, and therefore a unified kernel for a whole image is not appropriate. To address this issue, we propose a method that is locality adaptive for multi-modality fusion. Second, to learn this locality adaptive fusion, we utilize 1 x 1 x 1 kernel so that the number of additional parameters incurred by our method is kept minimum. This also naturally produces a fused image which acts as a pseudo input for the subsequent learning stages. Third, the proposed locality adaptive fusion mechanism is learned jointly with the PET image synthesis in an end-to-end trained 3D conditional GANs model developed by us. Our 3D GANs model generates high quality PET images by employing large-sized image patches and hierarchical features. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the traditional multi-modality fusion methods used in deep networks, as well as the state-of-the-art PET estimation approaches