Simultaneous synthesis of FLAIR and segmentation of white matter hypointensities from T1 MRIs
This addresses a practical issue for medical imaging researchers and clinicians dealing with incomplete retrospective datasets, though it is incremental as it builds on existing imputation and segmentation methods.
The paper tackled the problem of segmenting white matter lesions in brain MRIs when FLAIR sequences are missing by proposing a method that jointly optimizes modality imputation and segmentation using convolutional neural networks. The result showed that this approach produces more realistic synthetic FLAIR images from T1-weighted images and improves lesion segmentation accuracy.
Segmenting vascular pathologies such as white matter lesions in Brain magnetic resonance images (MRIs) require acquisition of multiple sequences such as T1-weighted (T1-w) --on which lesions appear hypointense-- and fluid attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) sequence --where lesions appear hyperintense--. However, most of the existing retrospective datasets do not consist of FLAIR sequences. Existing missing modality imputation methods separate the process of imputation, and the process of segmentation. In this paper, we propose a method to link both modality imputation and segmentation using convolutional neural networks. We show that by jointly optimizing the imputation network and the segmentation network, the method not only produces more realistic synthetic FLAIR images from T1-w images, but also improves the segmentation of WMH from T1-w images only.