Generative Adversarial Training for MRA Image Synthesis Using Multi-Contrast MRI
This work addresses the need for synthetic MRA images in medical imaging when scans are missing, offering a tool for retrospective evaluations, but it is incremental as it builds on existing GAN methods with a domain-specific enhancement.
The authors tackled the problem of generating Magnetic Resonance Angiography (MRA) images from T1-weighted and T2-weighted MRI scans using a generative adversarial network (GAN) with a novel steerable filter loss, resulting in improved overlap scores and visual quality compared to a baseline GAN.
Magnetic Resonance Angiography (MRA) has become an essential MR contrast for imaging and evaluation of vascular anatomy and related diseases. MRA acquisitions are typically ordered for vascular interventions, whereas in typical scenarios, MRA sequences can be absent in the patient scans. This motivates the need for a technique that generates inexistent MRA from existing MR multi-contrast, which could be a valuable tool in retrospective subject evaluations and imaging studies. In this paper, we present a generative adversarial network (GAN) based technique to generate MRA from T1-weighted and T2-weighted MRI images, for the first time to our knowledge. To better model the representation of vessels which the MRA inherently highlights, we design a loss term dedicated to a faithful reproduction of vascularities. To that end, we incorporate steerable filter responses of the generated and reference images inside a Huber function loss term. Extending the well- established generator-discriminator architecture based on the recent PatchGAN model with the addition of steerable filter loss, the proposed steerable GAN (sGAN) method is evaluated on the large public database IXI. Experimental results show that the sGAN outperforms the baseline GAN method in terms of an overlap score with similar PSNR values, while it leads to improved visual perceptual quality.