Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in MR Images using Multi-Contrast Information

Anomaly detection in medical imaging is to distinguish the relevant biomarkers of diseases from those of normal tissues. Deep supervised learning methods have shown potentials in various detection tasks, but its performances would be limited in medical imaging fields where collecting annotated anomaly data is limited and labor-intensive. Therefore, unsupervised anomaly detection can be an effective tool for clinical practices, which uses only unlabeled normal images as training data. In this paper, we developed an unsupervised learning framework for pixel-wise anomaly detection in multi-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The framework has two steps of feature generation and density estimation with Gaussian mixture model (GMM). A feature is derived through the learning of contrast-to-contrast translation that effectively captures the normal tissue characteristics in multi-contrast MRI. The feature is collaboratively used with another feature that is the low-dimensional representation of multi-contrast images. In density estimation using GMM, a simple but efficient way is introduced to handle the singularity problem which interrupts the joint learning process. The proposed method outperforms previous anomaly detection approaches. Quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in anomaly detection for multi-contrast MRI.

Synthesis of Brain Tumor MR Images for Learning Data Augmentation

Medical image analysis using deep neural networks has been actively studied. Deep neural networks are trained by learning data. For accurate training of deep neural networks, the learning data should be sufficient, of good quality, and should have a generalized property. However, in medical images, it is difficult to acquire sufficient patient data because of the difficulty of patient recruitment, the burden of annotation of lesions by experts, and the invasion of patients' privacy. In comparison, the medical images of healthy volunteers can be easily acquired. Using healthy brain images, the proposed method synthesizes multi-contrast magnetic resonance images of brain tumors. Because tumors have complex features, the proposed method simplifies them into concentric circles that are easily controllable. Then it converts the concentric circles into various realistic shapes of tumors through deep neural networks. Because numerous healthy brain images are easily available, our method can synthesize a huge number of the brain tumor images with various concentric circles. We performed qualitative and quantitative analysis to assess the usefulness of augmented data from the proposed method. Intuitive and interesting experimental results are available online at https://github.com/KSH0660/BrainTumor

Attention Guided Metal Artifact Correction in MRI using Deep Neural Networks

An attention guided scheme for metal artifact correction in MRI using deep neural network is proposed in this paper. The inputs of the networks are two distorted images obtained with dual-polarity readout gradients. With MR image generation module and the additional data consistency loss to the previous work [1], the network is trained to estimate the frequency-shift map, off-resonance map, and attention map. The attention map helps to produce better distortion-corrected images by weighting on more relevant distortion-corrected images where two distortion-corrected images are produced with half of the frequency-shift maps. In this paper, we observed that in a real MRI environment, two distorted images obtained with opposite polarities of readout gradient showed artifacts in a different region. Therefore, we proved that using the attention map was important in that it reduced the residual ripple and pile-up artifacts near metallic implants.