ReBrain: Brain MRI Reconstruction from Sparse CT Slice via Retrieval-Augmented Diffusion
This addresses the issue of MRI unavailability for certain patients by enabling accurate brain MRI synthesis from CT, though it is incremental as it builds on existing cross-modal reconstruction methods.
The paper tackled the problem of reconstructing full brain MRI volumes from sparse CT scans, which is challenging due to low-dose protocols, and proposed ReBrain, a retrieval-augmented diffusion framework that achieved state-of-the-art performance on SynthRAD2023 and BraTS datasets.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) plays a crucial role in brain disease diagnosis, but it is not always feasible for certain patients due to physical or clinical constraints. Recent studies attempt to synthesize MRI from Computed Tomography (CT) scans; however, low-dose protocols often result in highly sparse CT volumes with poor through-plane resolution, making accurate reconstruction of the full brain MRI volume particularly challenging. To address this, we propose ReBrain, a retrieval-augmented diffusion framework for brain MRI reconstruction. Given any 3D CT scan with limited slices, we first employ a Brownian Bridge Diffusion Model (BBDM) to synthesize MRI slices along the 2D dimension. Simultaneously, we retrieve structurally and pathologically similar CT slices from a comprehensive prior database via a fine-tuned retrieval model. These retrieved slices are used as references, incorporated through a ControlNet branch to guide the generation of intermediate MRI slices and ensure structural continuity. We further account for rare retrieval failures when the database lacks suitable references and apply spherical linear interpolation to provide supplementary guidance. Extensive experiments on SynthRAD2023 and BraTS demonstrate that ReBrain achieves state-of-the-art performance in cross-modal reconstruction under sparse conditions.