Multi-Contrast Complementary Learning for Accelerated MR Imaging

• Published in: IEEE journal of biomedical and health informatics Vol. 28; no. 3; pp. 1436 - 1447
• Main Authors: Li, Bangjun, Hu, Weifeng, Feng, Chun-Mei, Li, Yujun, Liu, Zhi, Xu, Yong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.03.2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Complementary information fusion; Convolutional neural networks; Data integration; Electric Power Supplies; fast reconstruction; Humans; Image acquisition; Image contrast; Image degradation; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; Image quality; Image reconstruction; Knowledge; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; multi-contrast sequence; Transformers
• ISSN: 2168-2194; 2168-2208; 2168-2208
• DOI: 10.1109/JBHI.2023.3348328

Thanks to its powerful ability to depict high-resolution anatomical information, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become an essential non-invasive scanning technique in clinical practice. However, excessive acquisition time often leads to the degradation of image quality and psychological discomfort among subjects, hindering its further popularization. Besides reconstructing images from the undersampled protocol itself, multi-contrast MRI protocols bring promising solutions by leveraging additional morphological priors for the target modality. Nevertheless, previous multi-contrast techniques mainly adopt a simple fusion mechanism that inevitably ignores valuable knowledge. In this work, we propose a novel multi-contrast complementary information aggregation network named MCCA, aiming to exploit available complementary representations fully to reconstruct the undersampled modality. Specifically, a multi-scale feature fusion mechanism has been introduced to incorporate complementary-transferable knowledge into the target modality. Moreover, a hybrid convolution transformer block was developed to extract global-local context dependencies simultaneously, which combines the advantages of CNNs while maintaining the merits of Transformers. Compared to existing MRI reconstruction methods, the proposed method has demonstrated its superiority through extensive experiments on different datasets under different acceleration factors and undersampling patterns.