Arjun D Desai

Arjun D Desai, Andrew M Schmidt, Elka B Rubin et al.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a cornerstone of modern medical imaging. However, long image acquisition times, the need for qualitative expert analysis, and the lack of (and difficulty extracting) quantitative indicators that are sensitive to tissue health have curtailed widespread clinical and research studies. While recent machine learning methods for MRI reconstruction and analysis have shown promise for reducing this burden, these techniques are primarily validated with imperfect image quality metrics, which are discordant with clinically-relevant measures that ultimately hamper clinical deployment and clinician trust. To mitigate this challenge, we present the Stanford Knee MRI with Multi-Task Evaluation (SKM-TEA) dataset, a collection of quantitative knee MRI (qMRI) scans that enables end-to-end, clinically-relevant evaluation of MRI reconstruction and analysis tools. This 1.6TB dataset consists of raw-data measurements of ~25,000 slices (155 patients) of anonymized patient MRI scans, the corresponding scanner-generated DICOM images, manual segmentations of four tissues, and bounding box annotations for sixteen clinically relevant pathologies. We provide a framework for using qMRI parameter maps, along with image reconstructions and dense image labels, for measuring the quality of qMRI biomarker estimates extracted from MRI reconstruction, segmentation, and detection techniques. Finally, we use this framework to benchmark state-of-the-art baselines on this dataset. We hope our SKM-TEA dataset and code can enable a broad spectrum of research for modular image reconstruction and image analysis in a clinically informed manner. Dataset access, code, and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/StanfordMIMI/skm-tea.

Batu Ozturkler, Arda Sahiner, Tolga Ergen et al. · stanford

Unrolled neural networks have recently achieved state-of-the-art accelerated MRI reconstruction. These networks unroll iterative optimization algorithms by alternating between physics-based consistency and neural-network based regularization. However, they require several iterations of a large neural network to handle high-dimensional imaging tasks such as 3D MRI. This limits traditional training algorithms based on backpropagation due to prohibitively large memory and compute requirements for calculating gradients and storing intermediate activations. To address this challenge, we propose Greedy LEarning for Accelerated MRI (GLEAM) reconstruction, an efficient training strategy for high-dimensional imaging settings. GLEAM splits the end-to-end network into decoupled network modules. Each module is optimized in a greedy manner with decoupled gradient updates, reducing the memory footprint during training. We show that the decoupled gradient updates can be performed in parallel on multiple graphical processing units (GPUs) to further reduce training time. We present experiments with 2D and 3D datasets including multi-coil knee, brain, and dynamic cardiac cine MRI. We observe that: i) GLEAM generalizes as well as state-of-the-art memory-efficient baselines such as gradient checkpointing and invertible networks with the same memory footprint, but with 1.3x faster training; ii) for the same memory footprint, GLEAM yields 1.1dB PSNR gain in 2D and 1.8 dB in 3D over end-to-end baselines.

Arjun D Desai, Batu M Ozturkler, Christopher M Sandino et al.

Deep learning (DL) has shown promise for faster, high quality accelerated MRI reconstruction. However, supervised DL methods depend on extensive amounts of fully-sampled (labeled) data and are sensitive to out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts, particularly low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) acquisitions. To alleviate this challenge, we propose Noise2Recon, a model-agnostic, consistency training method for joint MRI reconstruction and denoising that can use both fully-sampled (labeled) and undersampled (unlabeled) scans in semi-supervised and self-supervised settings. With limited or no labeled training data, Noise2Recon outperforms compressed sensing and deep learning baselines, including supervised networks, augmentation-based training, fine-tuned denoisers, and self-supervised methods, and matches performance of supervised models, which were trained with 14x more fully-sampled scans. Noise2Recon also outperforms all baselines, including state-of-the-art fine-tuning and augmentation techniques, among low-SNR scans and when generalizing to other OOD factors, such as changes in acceleration factors and different datasets. Augmentation extent and loss weighting hyperparameters had negligible impact on Noise2Recon compared to supervised methods, which may indicate increased training stability. Our code is available at https://github.com/ad12/meddlr.