Artifact Disentanglement Network for Unsupervised Metal Artifact ReductionHaofu Liao, Wei-An Lin, Jianbo Yuan et al.
Current deep neural network based approaches to computed tomography (CT) metal artifact reduction (MAR) are supervised methods which rely heavily on synthesized data for training. However, as synthesized data may not perfectly simulate the underlying physical mechanisms of CT imaging, the supervised methods often generalize poorly to clinical applications. To address this problem, we propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first unsupervised learning approach to MAR. Specifically, we introduce a novel artifact disentanglement network that enables different forms of generations and regularizations between the artifact-affected and artifact-free image domains to support unsupervised learning. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms the existing unsupervised models for image-to-image translation problems, and achieves comparable performance to existing supervised models on a synthesized dataset. When applied to clinical datasets, our method achieves considerable improvements over the supervised models. The source code of this paper is publicly available at https://github.com/liaohaofu/adn.
6.3IVAug 15, 2019
Deep Slice Interpolation via Marginal Super-Resolution, Fusion and RefinementCheng Peng, Wei-An Lin, Haofu Liao et al.
We propose a marginal super-resolution (MSR) approach based on 2D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for interpolating an anisotropic brain magnetic resonance scan along the highly under-sampled direction, which is assumed to axial without loss of generality. Previous methods for slice interpolation only consider data from pairs of adjacent 2D slices. The possibility of fusing information from the direction orthogonal to the 2D slices remains unexplored. Our approach performs MSR in both sagittal and coronal directions, which provides an initial estimate for slice interpolation. The interpolated slices are then fused and refined in the axial direction for improved consistency. Since MSR consists of only 2D operations, it is more feasible in terms of GPU memory consumption and requires fewer training samples compared to 3D CNNs. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms traditional linear interpolation and baseline 2D/3D CNN-based approaches. We conclude by showcasing the method's practical utility in estimating brain volumes from under-sampled brain MR scans through semantic segmentation.