Multi-Modal MRI Reconstruction Assisted with Spatial Alignment Network
This addresses image quality issues in accelerated MRI scans for medical diagnosis, but is incremental as it builds on existing multi-modal reconstruction methods.
The paper tackles the problem of multi-modal MRI reconstruction being negatively affected by spatial misalignment between modalities, common in clinical practice, by introducing a spatial alignment network to compensate for misalignment, resulting in improved reconstruction quality demonstrated on clinical MRI and multi-coil k-space data.
In clinical practice, multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with different contrasts is usually acquired in a single study to assess different properties of the same region of interest in the human body. The whole acquisition process can be accelerated by having one or more modalities under-sampled in the $k$-space. Recent research has shown that, considering the redundancy between different modalities, a target MRI modality under-sampled in the $k$-space can be more efficiently reconstructed with a fully-sampled reference MRI modality. However, we find that the performance of the aforementioned multi-modal reconstruction can be negatively affected by subtle spatial misalignment between different modalities, which is actually common in clinical practice. In this paper, we improve the quality of multi-modal reconstruction by compensating for such spatial misalignment with a spatial alignment network. First, our spatial alignment network estimates the displacement between the fully-sampled reference and the under-sampled target images, and warps the reference image accordingly. Then, the aligned fully-sampled reference image joins the multi-modal reconstruction of the under-sampled target image. Also, considering the contrast difference between the target and reference images, we have designed a cross-modality-synthesis-based registration loss in combination with the reconstruction loss, to jointly train the spatial alignment network and the reconstruction network. The experiments on both clinical MRI and multi-coil $k$-space raw data demonstrate the superiority and robustness of the multi-modal MRI reconstruction empowered with our spatial alignment network. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/woxuankai/SpatialAlignmentNetwork}.