Undersampled Multi-Contrast MRI Reconstruction Based on Double-Domain Generative Adversarial Network

• Published in: IEEE journal of biomedical and health informatics Vol. 26; no. 9; pp. 4371 - 4377
• Main Authors: Wei, Haining, Li, Zhongsen, Wang, Shuai, Li, Rui
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.09.2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Biomedical imaging; cross-domain deep learning; Deep learning; Domains; Generative adversarial network; Generative adversarial networks; Generators; High acceleration; Image acquisition; Image contrast; Image processing; Image quality; Image reconstruction; image synthesis; Magnetic resonance imaging; Medical imaging; multi-contrast MRI; Neuroimaging; Redundancy; Synthesis; Training
• DOI: 10.1109/JBHI.2022.3143104
• ISSN: 2168-2194; 2168-2208

Multi-contrast magnetic resonance imaging can provide comprehensive information for clinical diagnosis. However, multi-contrast imaging suffers from long acquisition time, which makes it inhibitive for daily clinical practice. Subsampling k-space is one of the main methods to speed up scan time. Missing k-space samples will lead to inevitable serious artifacts and noise. Considering the assumption that different contrast modalities share some mutual information, it may be possible to exploit this redundancy to accelerate multi-contrast imaging acquisition. Recently, generative adversarial network shows superior performance in image reconstruction and synthesis. Some studies based on k-space reconstruction also exhibit superior performance over conventional state-of-art method. In this study, we propose a cross-domain two-stage generative adversarial network for multi-contrast images reconstruction based on prior full-sampled contrast and undersampled information. The new approach integrates reconstruction and synthesis, which estimates and completes the missing k-space and then refines in image space. It takes one fully-sampled contrast modality data and highly undersampled data from several other modalities as input, and outputs high quality images for each contrast simultaneously. The network is trained and tested on a public brain dataset from healthy subjects. Quantitative comparisons against baseline clearly indicate that the proposed method can effectively reconstruct undersampled images. Even under high acceleration, the network still can recover texture details and reduce artifacts.