Chungseok Oh

Taechang Kim, Sooyeon Ji, Kyeongseon Min et al.

$χ$-separation is an advanced quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) method that is designed to generate paramagnetic ($χ_{para}$) and diamagnetic ($|χ_{dia}|$) susceptibility maps, reflecting the distribution of iron and myelin in the brain. However, vessels have shown artifacts, interfering with the accurate quantification of iron and myelin in applications. To address this challenge, a new vessel segmentation method for $χ$-separation is developed. The method comprises three steps: 1) Seed generation from $\textit{R}_2^*$ and the product of $χ_{para}$ and $|χ_{dia}|$ maps; 2) Region growing, guided by vessel geometry, creating a vessel mask; 3) Refinement of the vessel mask by excluding non-vessel structures. The performance of the method was compared to conventional vessel segmentation methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. To demonstrate the utility of the method, it was tested in two applications: quantitative evaluation of a neural network-based $χ$-separation reconstruction method ($χ$-sepnet-$\textit{R}_2^*$) and population-averaged region of interest (ROI) analysis. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance to the conventional vessel segmentation methods, effectively excluding the non-vessel structures, achieving the highest Dice score coefficient. For the applications, applying vessel masks report notable improvements for the quantitative evaluation of $χ$-sepnet-$\textit{R}_2^*$ and statistically significant differences in population-averaged ROI analysis. These applications suggest excluding vessels when analyzing the $χ$-separation maps provide more accurate evaluations. The proposed method has the potential to facilitate various applications, offering reliable analysis through the generation of a high-quality vessel mask.

Dongmyung Shin, Younghoon Kim, Chungseok Oh et al.

Carefully engineered radiofrequency (RF) pulses play a key role in a number of systems such as mobile phone, radar, and magnetic resonance imaging. The design of an RF waveform, however, is often posed as an inverse problem with no general solution. As a result, various design methods each with a specific purpose have been developed based on the intuition of human experts. In this work, we propose an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered RF pulse design framework, DeepRF, which utilizes the self-learning characteristics of deep reinforcement learning to generate a novel RF pulse. The effectiveness of DeepRF is demonstrated using four types of RF pulses that are commonly used. The DeepRF-designed pulses successfully satisfy the design criteria while reporting reduced energy. Analyses demonstrate the pulses utilize new mechanisms of magnetization manipulation, suggesting the potentials of DeepRF in discovering unseen design dimensions beyond human intuition. This work may lay the foundation for an emerging field of AI-driven RF waveform design.