Dong Liang

Wenxin Wang, Zhuo-Xu Cui, Guanxun Cheng et al.

Accurate detection and segmentation of brain tumors is critical for medical diagnosis. However, current supervised learning methods require extensively annotated images and the state-of-the-art generative models used in unsupervised methods often have limitations in covering the whole data distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel framework Two-Stage Generative Model (TSGM) that combines Cycle Generative Adversarial Network (CycleGAN) and Variance Exploding stochastic differential equation using joint probability (VE-JP) to improve brain tumor detection and segmentation. The CycleGAN is trained on unpaired data to generate abnormal images from healthy images as data prior. Then VE-JP is implemented to reconstruct healthy images using synthetic paired abnormal images as a guide, which alters only pathological regions but not regions of healthy. Notably, our method directly learned the joint probability distribution for conditional generation. The residual between input and reconstructed images suggests the abnormalities and a thresholding method is subsequently applied to obtain segmentation results. Furthermore, the multimodal results are weighted with different weights to improve the segmentation accuracy further. We validated our method on three datasets, and compared with other unsupervised methods for anomaly detection and segmentation. The DSC score of 0.8590 in BraTs2020 dataset, 0.6226 in ITCS dataset and 0.7403 in In-house dataset show that our method achieves better segmentation performance and has better generalization.

Taofeng Xie, Zhuo-Xu Cui, Chen Luo et al.

Positron Emission Tomography and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (PET-MRI) systems can obtain functional and anatomical scans. PET suffers from a low signal-to-noise ratio. Meanwhile, the k-space data acquisition process in MRI is time-consuming. The study aims to accelerate MRI and enhance PET image quality. Conventional approaches involve the separate reconstruction of each modality within PET-MRI systems. However, there exists complementary information among multi-modal images. The complementary information can contribute to image reconstruction. In this study, we propose a novel PET-MRI joint reconstruction model employing a mutual consistency-driven diffusion mode, namely MC-Diffusion. MC-Diffusion learns the joint probability distribution of PET and MRI for utilizing complementary information. We conducted a series of contrast experiments about LPLS, Joint ISAT-net and MC-Diffusion by the ADNI dataset. The results underscore the qualitative and quantitative improvements achieved by MC-Diffusion, surpassing the state-of-the-art method.

Zhuo-Xu Cui, Congcong Liu, Xiaohong Fan et al.

In the field of parallel imaging (PI), alongside image-domain regularization methods, substantial research has been dedicated to exploring $k$-space interpolation. However, the interpretability of these methods remains an unresolved issue. Furthermore, these approaches currently face acceleration limitations that are comparable to those experienced by image-domain methods. In order to enhance interpretability and overcome the acceleration limitations, this paper introduces an interpretable framework that unifies both $k$-space interpolation techniques and image-domain methods, grounded in the physical principles of heat diffusion equations. Building upon this foundational framework, a novel $k$-space interpolation method is proposed. Specifically, we model the process of high-frequency information attenuation in $k$-space as a heat diffusion equation, while the effort to reconstruct high-frequency information from low-frequency regions can be conceptualized as a reverse heat equation. However, solving the reverse heat equation poses a challenging inverse problem. To tackle this challenge, we modify the heat equation to align with the principles of magnetic resonance PI physics and employ the score-based generative method to precisely execute the modified reverse heat diffusion. Finally, experimental validation conducted on publicly available datasets demonstrates the superiority of the proposed approach over traditional $k$-space interpolation methods, deep learning-based $k$-space interpolation methods, and conventional diffusion models in terms of reconstruction accuracy, particularly in high-frequency regions.

Chen Luo, Huayu Wang, Taofeng Xie et al.

Recently, regularization model-driven deep learning (DL) has gained significant attention due to its ability to leverage the potent representational capabilities of DL while retaining the theoretical guarantees of regularization models. However, most of these methods are tailored for supervised learning scenarios that necessitate fully sampled labels, which can pose challenges in practical MRI applications. To tackle this challenge, we propose a self-supervised DL approach for accelerated MRI that is theoretically guaranteed and does not rely on fully sampled labels. Specifically, we achieve neural network structure regularization by exploiting the inherent structural low-rankness of the $k$-space data. Simultaneously, we constrain the network structure to resemble a nonexpansive mapping, ensuring the network's convergence to a fixed point. Thanks to this well-defined network structure, this fixed point can completely reconstruct the missing $k$-space data based on matrix completion theory, even in situations where full-sampled labels are unavailable. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed method and demonstrate its superiority over existing self-supervised approaches and traditional regularization methods, achieving performance comparable to that of supervised learning methods in certain scenarios.

Zeyu Zhang, Yuanshen Zhao, Jingxian Duan et al.

The diagnosis and prognosis of cancer are typically based on multi-modal clinical data, including histology images and genomic data, due to the complex pathogenesis and high heterogeneity. Despite the advancements in digital pathology and high-throughput genome sequencing, establishing effective multi-modal fusion models for survival prediction and revealing the potential association between histopathology and transcriptomics remains challenging. In this paper, we propose Pathology-Genome Heterogeneous Graph (PGHG) that integrates whole slide images (WSI) and bulk RNA-Seq expression data with heterogeneous graph neural network for cancer survival analysis. The PGHG consists of biological knowledge-guided representation learning network and pathology-genome heterogeneous graph. The representation learning network utilizes the biological prior knowledge of intra-modal and inter-modal data associations to guide the feature extraction. The node features of each modality are updated through attention-based graph learning strategy. Unimodal features and bi-modal fused features are extracted via attention pooling module and then used for survival prediction. We evaluate the model on low-grade gliomas, glioblastoma, and kidney renal papillary cell carcinoma datasets from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University (FAHZU). Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms both unimodal and other multi-modal fusion models. For demonstrating the model interpretability, we also visualize the attention heatmap of pathological images and utilize integrated gradient algorithm to identify important tissue structure, biological pathways and key genes.