Synthetic Perfusion Maps: Imaging Perfusion Deficits in DSC-MRI with Deep Learning

In this work, we present a novel convolutional neural net- work based method for perfusion map generation in dynamic suscepti- bility contrast-enhanced perfusion imaging. The proposed architecture is trained end-to-end and solely relies on raw perfusion data for inference. We used a dataset of 151 acute ischemic stroke cases for evaluation. Our method generates perfusion maps that are comparable to the target maps used for clinical routine, while being model-free, fast, and less noisy.

Learning from a Handful Volumes: MRI Resolution Enhancement with Volumetric Super-Resolution Forests

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) enables 3-D imaging of anatomical structures. However, the acquisition of MR volumes with high spatial resolution leads to long scan times. To this end, we propose volumetric super-resolution forests (VSRF) to enhance MRI resolution retrospectively. Our method learns a locally linear mapping between low-resolution and high-resolution volumetric image patches by employing random forest regression. We customize features suitable for volumetric MRI to train the random forest and propose a median tree ensemble for robust regression. VSRF outperforms state-of-the-art example-based super-resolution in term of image quality and efficiency for model training and inference in different MRI datasets. It is also superior to unsupervised methods with just a handful or even a single volume to assemble training data.