Hui Zhang

Tianshu Zheng, Zican Wang, Timothy Bray et al.

Quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (qMRI) is increasingly investigated for use in a variety of clinical tasks from diagnosis, through staging, to treatment monitoring. However, experiment design in qMRI, the identification of the optimal acquisition protocols, has been focused on obtaining the most precise parameter estimations, with no regard for the specific requirements of downstream tasks. Here we propose SCREENER: A general framework for task-specific experiment design in quantitative MRI. SCREENER incorporates a task-specific objective and seeks the optimal protocol with a deep-reinforcement-learning (DRL) based optimization strategy. To illustrate this framework, we employ a task of classifying the inflammation status of bone marrow using diffusion MRI data with intravoxel incoherent motion (IVIM) modelling. Results demonstrate SCREENER outperforms previous ad hoc and optimized protocols under clinical signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions, achieving significant improvement, both in binary classification tasks, e.g. from 67% to 89%, and in a multi-class classification task, from 46% to 59%. Additionally, we show this improvement is robust to the SNR. Lastly, we demonstrate the advantage of DRL-based optimization strategy, enabling zero-shot discovery of near-optimal protocols for a range of SNRs not used in training. In conclusion, SCREENER has the potential to enable wider uptake of qMRI in the clinic.

Wenhan Dai, Zhi Zeng, Daowei Dou et al.

The monitoring of Cs-137 in seawater using scintillation detector relies on the spectrum analysis method to extract the Cs-137 concentration. And when in poor statistic situation, the calculation result of the traditional net peak area (NPA) method has a large uncertainty. We present a machine learning based method to better analyze the gamma-ray spectrum with low Cs-137 concentration. We apply multilayer perceptron (MLP) to analyze the 662 keV full energy peak of Cs-137 in the seawater spectrum. And the MLP can be trained with a few measured background spectrums by combining the simulated Cs-137 signal with measured background spectrums. Thus, it can save the time of preparing and measuring the standard samples for generating the training dataset. To validate the MLP-based method, we use Geant4 and background gamma-ray spectrums measured by a seaborne monitoring device to generate an independent test dataset to test the result by our method and the traditional NPA method. We find that the MLP-based method achieves a root mean squared error of 0.159, 2.3 times lower than that of the traditional net peak area method, indicating the MLP-based method improves the precision of Cs-137 concentration calculation