Kevin N. Sheth

Bo Zhou, Jo Schlemper, Neel Dey et al. · mit

While enabling accelerated acquisition and improved reconstruction accuracy, current deep MRI reconstruction networks are typically supervised, require fully sampled data, and are limited to Cartesian sampling patterns. These factors limit their practical adoption as fully-sampled MRI is prohibitively time-consuming to acquire clinically. Further, non-Cartesian sampling patterns are particularly desirable as they are more amenable to acceleration and show improved motion robustness. To this end, we present a fully self-supervised approach for accelerated non-Cartesian MRI reconstruction which leverages self-supervision in both k-space and image domains. In training, the undersampled data are split into disjoint k-space domain partitions. For the k-space self-supervision, we train a network to reconstruct the input undersampled data from both the disjoint partitions and from itself. For the image-level self-supervision, we enforce appearance consistency obtained from the original undersampled data and the two partitions. Experimental results on our simulated multi-coil non-Cartesian MRI dataset demonstrate that DDSS can generate high-quality reconstruction that approaches the accuracy of the fully supervised reconstruction, outperforming previous baseline methods. Finally, DDSS is shown to scale to highly challenging real-world clinical MRI reconstruction acquired on a portable low-field (0.064 T) MRI scanner with no data available for supervised training while demonstrating improved image quality as compared to traditional reconstruction, as determined by a radiologist study.

Pablo Laso, Stefano Cerri, Annabel Sorby-Adams et al.

Brain atrophy and white matter hyperintensity (WMH) are critical neuroimaging features for ascertaining brain injury in cerebrovascular disease and multiple sclerosis. Automated segmentation and quantification is desirable but existing methods require high-resolution MRI with good signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This precludes application to clinical and low-field portable MRI (pMRI) scans, thus hampering large-scale tracking of atrophy and WMH progression, especially in underserved areas where pMRI has huge potential. Here we present a method that segments white matter hyperintensity and 36 brain regions from scans of any resolution and contrast (including pMRI) without retraining. We show results on eight public datasets and on a private dataset with paired high- and low-field scans (3T and 64mT), where we attain strong correlation between the WMH ($ρ$=.85) and hippocampal volumes (r=.89) estimated at both fields. Our method is publicly available as part of FreeSurfer, at: http://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/WMH-SynthSeg.

Juan Eugenio Iglesias, Riana Schleicher, Sonia Laguna et al.

The recent introduction of portable, low-field MRI (LF-MRI) into the clinical setting has the potential to transform neuroimaging. However, LF-MRI is limited by lower resolution and signal-to-noise ratio, leading to incomplete characterization of brain regions. To address this challenge, recent advances in machine learning facilitate the synthesis of higher resolution images derived from one or multiple lower resolution scans. Here, we report the extension of a machine learning super-resolution (SR) algorithm to synthesize 1 mm isotropic MPRAGE-like scans from LF-MRI T1-weighted and T2-weighted sequences. Our initial results on a paired dataset of LF and high-field (HF, 1.5T-3T) clinical scans show that: (i) application of available automated segmentation tools directly to LF-MRI images falters; but (ii) segmentation tools succeed when applied to SR images with high correlation to gold standard measurements from HF-MRI (e.g., r = 0.85 for hippocampal volume, r = 0.84 for the thalamus, r = 0.92 for the whole cerebrum). This work demonstrates proof-of-principle post-processing image enhancement from lower resolution LF-MRI sequences. These results lay the foundation for future work to enhance the detection of normal and abnormal image findings at LF and ultimately improve the diagnostic performance of LF-MRI. Our tools are publicly available on FreeSurfer (surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/).

Ashish Mahabal, Kshiteej Sheth, Fabian Gieseke et al.

Astronomy light curves are sparse, gappy, and heteroscedastic. As a result standard time series methods regularly used for financial and similar datasets are of little help and astronomers are usually left to their own instruments and techniques to classify light curves. A common approach is to derive statistical features from the time series and to use machine learning methods, generally supervised, to separate objects into a few of the standard classes. In this work, we transform the time series to two-dimensional light curve representations in order to classify them using modern deep learning techniques. In particular, we show that convolutional neural networks based classifiers work well for broad characterization and classification. We use labeled datasets of periodic variables from CRTS survey and show how this opens doors for a quick classification of diverse classes with several possible exciting extensions.