Pascal Spincemaille

Jinwei Zhang, Pascal Spincemaille, Hang Zhang et al.

Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) involves acquisition and reconstruction of a series of images at multi-echo time points to estimate tissue field, which prolongs scan time and requires specific reconstruction technique. In this paper, we present our new framework, called Learned Acquisition and Reconstruction Optimization (LARO), which aims to accelerate the multi-echo gradient echo (mGRE) pulse sequence for QSM. Our approach involves optimizing a Cartesian multi-echo k-space sampling pattern with a deep reconstruction network. Next, this optimized sampling pattern was implemented in an mGRE sequence using Cartesian fan-beam k-space segmenting and ordering for prospective scans. Furthermore, we propose to insert a recurrent temporal feature fusion module into the reconstruction network to capture signal redundancies along echo time. Our ablation studies show that both the optimized sampling pattern and proposed reconstruction strategy help improve the quality of the multi-echo image reconstructions. Generalization experiments show that LARO is robust on the test data with new pathologies and different sequence parameters. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jinwei1209/LARO.git.

Renjiu Hu, Qihao Zhang, Pascal Spincemaille et al.

Purpose: To develop biophysics-based method for estimating perfusion Q from arterial spin labeling (ASL) images using deep learning. Methods: A 3D U-Net (QTMnet) was trained to estimate perfusion from 4D tracer propagation images. The network was trained and tested on simulated 4D tracer concentration data based on artificial vasculature structure generated by constrained constructive optimization (CCO) method. The trained network was further tested in a synthetic brain ASL image based on vasculature network extracted from magnetic resonance (MR) angiography. The estimations from both trained network and a conventional kinetic model were compared in ASL images acquired from eight healthy volunteers. Results: QTMnet accurately reconstructed perfusion Q from concentration data. Relative error of the synthetic brain ASL image was 7.04% for perfusion Q, lower than the error using single-delay ASL model: 25.15% for Q, and multi-delay ASL model: 12.62% for perfusion Q. Conclusion: QTMnet provides accurate estimation on perfusion parameters and is a promising approach as a clinical ASL MRI image processing pipeline.

Alexandra G. Roberts, Maneesh John, Jinwei Zhang et al.

We propose a novel spectral vision transformer architecture for efficient tokenization in limited data, with an emphasis on medical imaging. We outline convenient theoretical properties arising from the choice of basis including spatial invariance and optimal signal-to-noise ratio. We show reduced complexity arising from the spectral projection compared to spatial vision transformers. We show equitable or superior performance with a reduced number of parameters as compared to a variety of models including compact and standard vision transformers, convolutional neural networks with attention, shifted window transformers, multi-layer perceptrons, and logistic regression. We include simulated, public, and clinical data in our analysis and release our code at: \verb+github.com/agr78/spectralViT+.

Hang Zhang, Rongguang Wang, Jinwei Zhang et al.

We introduce Neural Representation of Distribution (NeRD) technique, a module for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that can estimate the feature distribution by optimizing an underlying function mapping image coordinates to the feature distribution. Using NeRD, we propose an end-to-end deep learning model for medical image segmentation that can compensate the negative impact of feature distribution shifting issue caused by commonly used network operations such as padding and pooling. An implicit function is used to represent the parameter space of the feature distribution by querying the image coordinate. With NeRD, the impact of issues such as over-segmenting and missing have been reduced, and experimental results on the challenging white matter lesion segmentation and left atrial segmentation verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code is available via https://github.com/tinymilky/NeRD.

Hang Zhang, Jinwei Zhang, Qihao Zhang et al.

Brain lesion volume measured on T2 weighted MRI images is a clinically important disease marker in multiple sclerosis (MS). Manual delineation of MS lesions is a time-consuming and highly operator-dependent task, which is influenced by lesion size, shape and conspicuity. Recently, automated lesion segmentation algorithms based on deep neural networks have been developed with promising results. In this paper, we propose a novel recurrent slice-wise attention network (RSANet), which models 3D MRI images as sequences of slices and captures long-range dependencies through a recurrent manner to utilize contextual information of MS lesions. Experiments on a dataset with 43 patients show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. Our implementation is available online at https://github.com/tinymilky/RSANet.

Ha Luu, Mert Sisman, Ilhami Kovanlikaya et al.

Paramagnetic rim lesions (PRLs) are an emerging biomarker in multiple sclerosis (MS). Manual identification and rim segmentation of PRLs on quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) images are time-consuming. Deep learning-based QSM-RimNet can provide automated PRL detection, but this method does not provide rim segmentation for microglial density quantification and requires precise QSM lesion masks. The purpose of this study is to develop a U-Net-based QSM-RimDS method for joint PRL detection and rim segmentation using readily available T2-weighted (T2W) fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) lesion masks. Two expert readers performed PRL classification and rim segmentation as the reference. Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) was used to assess the agreement between rim segmentation obtained by QSM-RimDS and the manual expert segmentation. The PRL detection performances of QSM-RimDS and QSM-RimNet were evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and precision-recall (PR) plots in a five-fold cross validation. A total of 260 PRLs (3.3\%) and 7720 non-PRLs (96.7\%) were identified by the readers. Compared to the expert rim segmentation, QSM-RimDS provided a mean DSC of 0.57 \pm 0.02 with moderate to high agreement (DSC \leq 0.5) in 73.8pm 5.7\% of PRLs over five folds. QSM-RimDS produced better and more consistent detection performance with a mean area under curve (AUC) of 0.754 \pm 0.037 vs. 0.514 \pm 0.121 by QSM-RimNet (46.7\% improvement) on PR plots, and 0.956 \pm 0.034 vs. 0.908 \pm 0.073 (5.3\% improvement) on ROC plots. In conclusion, QSM-RimDS improves PRL detection accuracy compared to QSM-RimNet and unlike QSM-RimNet can provide reasonably accurate rim segmentation.

Chao Li, Jiahao Li, Jinwei Zhang et al.

Purpose: To develop an MRI technique for free-breathing 3D whole-liver quantification of water T1, water T2, proton density fat fraction (PDFF), R2*. Methods: An Eight-echo spoiled gradient echo pulse sequence with spiral readout was developed by interleaving inversion recovery and T2 magnetization preparation. We propose a neural network based on a 4D and a 3D implicit neural representation (INR) which simultaneously learns the motion deformation fields and the static reference frame MRI subspace images respectively. Water and fat singular images were separated during network training, with no need of performing retrospective water-fat separation. T1, T2, R2* and proton density fat fraction (PDFF) produced by the proposed method were validated in vivo on 10 healthy subjects, using quantitative maps generated from conventional scans as reference. Results: Our results showed minimal bias and narrow 95% limits of agreement on T1, T2, R2* and PDFF values in the liver compared to conventional breath-holding scans. Conclusions: INR-MRF enabled co-registered 3D whole liver T1, T2, R2* and PDFF mapping in a single free-breathing scan.

Jinwei Zhang, Alexey Dimov, Chao Li et al.

Purpose: To improve the generalization ability of deep learning based predictions of quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) from high-pass filtered phase (HPFP) data. Methods: A network fine-tuning step called HP-FINE is proposed, which is based on the high-pass filtering forward model with low-frequency preservation regularization. Several comparisons were conducted: 1. HP-FINE with and without low-frequency regularization, 2. three 3D network architectures (Unet, Progressive Unet, and Big Unet), 3. two types of network output (recovered field and susceptibility), and 4. pre-training with and without the filtering augmentation. HPFP datasets with diverse high-pass filters, another acquisition voxel size, and prospective acquisition were used to assess the accuracy of QSM predictions. In the retrospective datasets, quantitative metrics (PSNR, SSIM, RMSE and HFEN) were used for evaluation. In the prospective dataset, statistics of ROI linear regression and Bland-Altman analysis were used for evaluation. Results: In the retrospective datasets, adding low-frequency regularization in HP-FINE substantially improved prediction accuracy compared to the pre-trained results, especially when combined with the filtering augmentation and recovered field output. In the prospective datasets, HP-FINE with low-frequency regularization and recovered field output demonstrated the preservation of ROI values, a result that was not achieved when using susceptibility as the output. Furthermore, Progressive Unet pre-trained with a combination of multiple losses outperformed both Unet and Progressive Unet pre-trained with a single loss in terms of preserving ROI values.

Chao Li, Hang Zhang, Jinwei Zhang et al.

An approach to reduce motion artifacts in Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping using deep learning is proposed. We use an affine motion model with randomly created motion profiles to simulate motion-corrupted QSM images. The simulated QSM image is paired with its motion-free reference to train a neural network using supervised learning. The trained network is tested on unseen simulated motion-corrupted QSM images, in healthy volunteers and in Parkinson's disease patients. The results show that motion artifacts, such as ringing and ghosting, were successfully suppressed.

Tanweer Rashid, Ahmed Abdulkadir, Ilya M. Nasrallah et al.

Lobar cerebral microbleeds (CMBs) and localized non-hemorrhage iron deposits in the basal ganglia have been associated with brain aging, vascular disease and neurodegenerative disorders. Particularly, CMBs are small lesions and require multiple neuroimaging modalities for accurate detection. Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) derived from in vivo magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is necessary to differentiate between iron content and mineralization. We set out to develop a deep learning-based segmentation method suitable for segmenting both CMBs and iron deposits. We included a convenience sample of 24 participants from the MESA cohort and used T2-weighted images, susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI), and QSM to segment the two types of lesions. We developed a protocol for simultaneous manual annotation of CMBs and non-hemorrhage iron deposits in the basal ganglia. This manual annotation was then used to train a deep convolution neural network (CNN). Specifically, we adapted the U-Net model with a higher number of resolution layers to be able to detect small lesions such as CMBs from standard resolution MRI. We tested different combinations of the three modalities to determine the most informative data sources for the detection tasks. In the detection of CMBs using single class and multiclass models, we achieved an average sensitivity and precision of between 0.84-0.88 and 0.40-0.59, respectively. The same framework detected non-hemorrhage iron deposits with an average sensitivity and precision of about 0.75-0.81 and 0.62-0.75, respectively. Our results showed that deep learning could automate the detection of small vessel disease lesions and including multimodal MR data (particularly QSM) can improve the detection of CMB and non-hemorrhage iron deposits with sensitivity and precision that is compatible with use in large-scale research studies.

Hang Zhang, Jinwei Zhang, Rongguang Wang et al.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions occupy a small fraction of the brain volume, and are heterogeneous with regards to shape, size and locations, which poses a great challenge for training deep learning based segmentation models. We proposed a new geometric loss formula to address the data imbalance and exploit the geometric property of MS lesions. We showed that traditional region-based and boundary-aware loss functions can be associated with the formula. We further develop and instantiate two loss functions containing first- and second-order geometric information of lesion regions to enforce regularization on optimizing deep segmentation models. Experimental results on two MS lesion datasets with different scales, acquisition protocols and resolutions demonstrated the superiority of our proposed methods compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Hang Zhang, Jinwei Zhang, Rongguang Wang et al.

Recently, 3D medical image reconstruction (MIR) and segmentation (MIS) based on deep neural networks have been developed with promising results, and attention mechanism has been further designed to capture global contextual information for performance enhancement. However, the large size of 3D volume images poses a great computational challenge to traditional attention methods. In this paper, we propose a folded attention (FA) approach to improve the computational efficiency of traditional attention methods on 3D medical images. The main idea is that we apply tensor folding and unfolding operations with four permutations to build four small sub-affinity matrices to approximate the original affinity matrix. Through four consecutive sub-attention modules of FA, each element in the feature tensor can aggregate spatial-channel information from all other elements. Compared to traditional attention methods, with moderate improvement of accuracy, FA can substantially reduce the computational complexity and GPU memory consumption. We demonstrate the superiority of our method on two challenging tasks for 3D MIR and MIS, which are quantitative susceptibility mapping and multiple sclerosis lesion segmentation.

Jinwei Zhang, Hang Zhang, Alan Wang et al.

The previously established LOUPE (Learning-based Optimization of the Under-sampling Pattern) framework for optimizing the k-space sampling pattern in MRI was extended in three folds: firstly, fully sampled multi-coil k-space data from the scanner, rather than simulated k-space data from magnitude MR images in LOUPE, was retrospectively under-sampled to optimize the under-sampling pattern of in-vivo k-space data; secondly, binary stochastic k-space sampling, rather than approximate stochastic k-space sampling of LOUPE during training, was applied together with a straight-through (ST) estimator to estimate the gradient of the threshold operation in a neural network; thirdly, modified unrolled optimization network, rather than modified U-Net in LOUPE, was used as the reconstruction network in order to reconstruct multi-coil data properly and reduce the dependency on training data. Experimental results show that when dealing with the in-vivo k-space data, unrolled optimization network with binary under-sampling block and ST estimator had better reconstruction performance compared to the ones with either U-Net reconstruction network or approximate sampling pattern optimization network, and once trained, the learned optimal sampling pattern worked better than the hand-crafted variable density sampling pattern when deployed with other conventional reconstruction methods.