Classification Using Global and Local Mahalanobis Distances

We propose a novel semi-parametric classifier based on Mahalanobis distances of an observation from the competing classes. Our tool is a generalized additive model with the logistic link function that uses these distances as features to estimate the posterior probabilities of the different classes. While popular parametric classifiers like linear and quadratic discriminant analyses are mainly motivated by the normality of the underlying distributions, the proposed classifier is more flexible and free from such parametric assumptions. Since the densities of elliptic distributions are functions of Mahalanobis distances, this classifier works well when the competing classes are (nearly) elliptic. In such cases, it often outperforms popular nonparametric classifiers, especially when the sample size is small compared to the dimension of the data. To cope with non-elliptic and possibly multimodal distributions, we propose a local version of the Mahalanobis distance. Subsequently, we propose another classifier based on a generalized additive model that uses the local Mahalanobis distances as features. This nonparametric classifier usually performs like the Mahalanobis distance based semiparametric classifier when the underlying distributions are elliptic, but outperforms it for several non-elliptic and multimodal distributions. We also investigate the behaviour of these two classifiers in high dimension, low sample size situations. A thorough numerical study involving several simulated and real datasets demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed classifiers in comparison to many state-of-the-art methods.

Volumetric Reconstruction Resolves Off-Resonance Artifacts in Static and Dynamic PROPELLER MRI

Off-resonance artifacts in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are visual distortions that occur when the actual resonant frequencies of spins within the imaging volume differ from the expected frequencies used to encode spatial information. These discrepancies can be caused by a variety of factors, including magnetic field inhomogeneities, chemical shifts, or susceptibility differences within the tissues. Such artifacts can manifest as blurring, ghosting, or misregistration of the reconstructed image, and they often compromise its diagnostic quality. We propose to resolve these artifacts by lifting the 2D MRI reconstruction problem to 3D, introducing an additional "spectral" dimension to model this off-resonance. Our approach is inspired by recent progress in modeling radiance fields, and is capable of reconstructing both static and dynamic MR images as well as separating fat and water, which is of independent clinical interest. We demonstrate our approach in the context of PROPELLER (Periodically Rotated Overlapping ParallEL Lines with Enhanced Reconstruction) MRI acquisitions, which are popular for their robustness to motion artifacts. Our method operates in a few minutes on a single GPU, and to our knowledge is the first to correct for chemical shift in gradient echo PROPELLER MRI reconstruction without additional measurements or pretraining data.