NeXtQSM -- A complete deep learning pipeline for data-consistent quantitative susceptibility mapping trained with hybrid data
This addresses limitations in QSM for medical imaging by providing an incremental improvement over previous deep learning methods.
The authors tackled the problem of deep learning-based Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM) by developing NeXtQSM, a framework that jointly solves processing steps with data consistency, resulting in robust and fast maps.
Deep learning based Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM) has shown great potential in recent years, obtaining similar results to established non-learning approaches. Many current deep learning approaches are not data consistent, require in vivo training data or solve the QSM problem in consecutive steps resulting in the propagation of errors. Here we aim to overcome these limitations and developed a framework to solve the QSM processing steps jointly. We developed a new hybrid training data generation method that enables the end-to-end training for solving background field correction and dipole inversion in a data-consistent fashion using a variational network that combines the QSM model term and a learned regularizer. We demonstrate that NeXtQSM overcomes the limitations of previous deep learning methods. NeXtQSM offers a new deep learning based pipeline for computing quantitative susceptibility maps that integrates each processing step into the training and provides results that are robust and fast.