Huafeng Liu

Rui Hu, Yunmei Chen, Kyungsang Kim et al.

Deep learning based PET image reconstruction methods have achieved promising results recently. However, most of these methods follow a supervised learning paradigm, which rely heavily on the availability of high-quality training labels. In particular, the long scanning time required and high radiation exposure associated with PET scans make obtaining this labels impractical. In this paper, we propose a dual-domain unsupervised PET image reconstruction method based on learned decent algorithm, which reconstructs high-quality PET images from sinograms without the need for image labels. Specifically, we unroll the proximal gradient method with a learnable l2,1 norm for PET image reconstruction problem. The training is unsupervised, using measurement domain loss based on deep image prior as well as image domain loss based on rotation equivariance property. The experimental results domonstrate the superior performance of proposed method compared with maximum likelihood expectation maximazation (MLEM), total-variation regularized EM (EM-TV) and deep image prior based method (DIP).

Chenxu Li, Rui Hu, Jianan Cui et al.

The integration of Time-of-Flight (TOF) information in the reconstruction process of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) yields improved image properties. However, implementing the cutting-edge model-based deep learning methods for TOF-PET reconstruction is challenging due to the substantial memory requirements. In this study, we present a novel model-based deep learning approach, LMPDNet, for TOF-PET reconstruction from list-mode data. We address the issue of real-time parallel computation of the projection matrix for list-mode data, and propose an iterative model-based module that utilizes a dedicated network model for list-mode data. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed LMPDNet outperforms traditional iteration-based TOF-PET list-mode reconstruction algorithms. Additionally, we compare the spatial and temporal consumption of list-mode data and sinogram data in model-based deep learning methods, demonstrating the superiority of list-mode data in model-based TOF-PET reconstruction.

Rui Hu, Jianan Cui, Chengjin Yu et al.

Dynamic positron emission tomography (dPET) image reconstruction is extremely challenging due to the limited counts received in individual frame. In this paper, we propose a spatial-temporal convolutional primal dual network (STPDnet) for dynamic PET image reconstruction. Both spatial and temporal correlations are encoded by 3D convolution operators. The physical projection of PET is embedded in the iterative learning process of the network, which provides the physical constraints and enhances interpretability. The experiments of real rat scan data have shown that the proposed method can achieve substantial noise reduction in both temporal and spatial domains and outperform the maximum likelihood expectation maximization (MLEM), spatial-temporal kernel method (KEM-ST), DeepPET and Learned Primal Dual (LPD).

Rui Hu, Chenxu Li, Kun Tian et al.

Time-of-flight (TOF) information provides more accurate location data for annihilation photons, thereby enhancing the quality of PET reconstruction images and reducing noise. List-mode reconstruction has a significant advantage in handling TOF information. However, current advanced TOF PET list-mode reconstruction algorithms still require improvements when dealing with low-count data. Deep learning algorithms have shown promising results in PET image reconstruction. Nevertheless, the incorporation of TOF information poses significant challenges related to the storage space required by deep learning methods, particularly for the advanced deep unrolled methods. In this study, we propose a deep unrolled primal dual network for TOF-PET list-mode reconstruction. The network is unrolled into multiple phases, with each phase comprising a dual network for list-mode domain updates and a primal network for image domain updates. We utilize CUDA for parallel acceleration and computation of the system matrix for TOF list-mode data, and we adopt a dynamic access strategy to mitigate memory consumption. Reconstructed images of different TOF resolutions and different count levels show that the proposed method outperforms the LM-OSEM, LM-EMTV, LM-SPDHG,LM-SPDHG-TV and FastPET method in both visually and quantitative analysis. These results demonstrate the potential application of deep unrolled methods for TOF-PET list-mode data and show better performance than current mainstream TOF-PET list-mode reconstruction algorithms, providing new insights for the application of deep learning methods in TOF list-mode data. The codes for this work are available at https://github.com/RickHH/LMPDnet

Jie Sun, Qian Xia, Chuanfu Sun et al.

Dynamic positron emission tomography (PET) images can reveal the distribution of tracers in the organism and the dynamic processes involved in biochemical reactions, and it is widely used in clinical practice. Despite the high effectiveness of dynamic PET imaging in studying the kinetics and metabolic processes of radiotracers. Pro-longed scan times can cause discomfort for both patients and medical personnel. This study proposes a dynamic frame prediction method for dynamic PET imaging, reduc-ing dynamic PET scanning time by applying a multi-module deep learning framework composed of reversible and irreversible modules. The network can predict kinetic parameter images based on the early frames of dynamic PET images, and then generate complete dynamic PET images. In validation experiments with simulated data, our network demonstrated good predictive performance for kinetic parameters and was able to reconstruct high-quality dynamic PET images. Additionally, in clinical data experiments, the network exhibited good generalization performance and attached that the proposed method has promising clinical application prospects.

Jianan Cui, Kuang Gong, Paul Han et al.

Arterial spin labeling (ASL) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a powerful imaging technology that can measure cerebral blood flow (CBF) quantitatively. However, since only a small portion of blood is labeled compared to the whole tissue volume, conventional ASL suffers from low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), poor spatial resolution, and long acquisition time. In this paper, we proposed a super-resolution method based on a multi-scale generative adversarial network (GAN) through unsupervised training. The network only needs the low-resolution (LR) ASL image itself for training and the T1-weighted image as the anatomical prior. No training pairs or pre-training are needed. A low-pass filter guided item was added as an additional loss to suppress the noise interference from the LR ASL image. After the network was trained, the super-resolution (SR) image was generated by supplying the upsampled LR ASL image and corresponding T1-weighted image to the generator of the last layer. Performance of the proposed method was evaluated by comparing the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM) using normal-resolution (NR) ASL image (5.5 min acquisition) and high-resolution (HR) ASL image (44 min acquisition) as the ground truth. Compared to the nearest, linear, and spline interpolation methods, the proposed method recovers more detailed structure information, reduces the image noise visually, and achieves the highest PSNR and SSIM when using HR ASL image as the ground-truth.

Nuobei Xie, Kuang Gong, Ning Guo et al.

Patlak model is widely used in 18F-FDG dynamic positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, where the estimated parametric images reveal important biochemical and physiology information. Because of better noise modeling and more information extracted from raw sinogram, direct Patlak reconstruction gains its popularity over the indirect approach which utilizes reconstructed dynamic PET images alone. As the prerequisite of direct Patlak methods, raw data from dynamic PET are rarely stored in clinics and difficult to obtain. In addition, the direct reconstruction is time-consuming due to the bottleneck of multiple-frame reconstruction. All of these impede the clinical adoption of direct Patlak reconstruction.In this work, we proposed a data-driven framework which maps the dynamic PET images to the high-quality motion-corrected direct Patlak images through a convolutional neural network. For the patient motion during the long period of dynamic PET scan, we combined the correction with the backward/forward projection in direct reconstruction to better fit the statistical model. Results based on fifteen clinical 18F-FDG dynamic brain PET datasets demonstrates the superiority of the proposed framework over Gaussian, nonlocal mean and BM4D denoising, regarding the image bias and contrast-to-noise ratio.

Nuobei Xie, Kuang Gong, Ning Guo et al.

Positron emission tomography (PET) is widely used for clinical diagnosis. As PET suffers from low resolution and high noise, numerous efforts try to incorporate anatomical priors into PET image reconstruction, especially with the development of hybrid PET/CT and PET/MRI systems. In this work, we proposed a novel 3D structural convolutional sparse coding (CSC) concept for penalized-likelihood PET image reconstruction, named 3D PET-CSC. The proposed 3D PET-CSC takes advantage of the convolutional operation and manages to incorporate anatomical priors without the need of registration or supervised training. As 3D PET-CSC codes the whole 3D PET image, instead of patches, it alleviates the staircase artifacts commonly presented in traditional patch-based sparse coding methods. Moreover, we developed the residual-image and order-subset mechanisms to further reduce the computational cost and accelerate the convergence for the proposed 3D PET-CSC method. Experiments based on computer simulations and clinical datasets demonstrate the superiority of 3D PET-CSC compared with other reference methods.

Ming Li, Weiwei Zhang, Guang Yang et al.

Multi-view echocardiographic sequences segmentation is crucial for clinical diagnosis. However, this task is challenging due to limited labeled data, huge noise, and large gaps across views. Here we propose a recurrent aggregation learning method to tackle this challenging task. By pyramid ConvBlocks, multi-level and multi-scale features are extracted efficiently. Hierarchical ConvLSTMs next fuse these features and capture spatial-temporal information in multi-level and multi-scale space. We further introduce a double-branch aggregation mechanism for segmentation and classification which are mutually promoted by deep aggregation of multi-level and multi-scale features. The segmentation branch provides information to guide the classification while the classification branch affords multi-view regularization to refine segmentations and further lessen gaps across views. Our method is built as an end-to-end framework for segmentation and classification. Adequate experiments on our multi-view dataset (9000 labeled images) and the CAMUS dataset (1800 labeled images) corroborate that our method achieves not only superior segmentation and classification accuracy but also prominent temporal stability.