DeepMpMRI: Tensor-decomposition Regularized Learning for Fast and High-Fidelity Multi-Parametric Microstructural MR Imaging

Deep learning has emerged as a promising approach for learning the nonlinear mapping between diffusion-weighted MR images and tissue parameters, which enables automatic and deep understanding of the brain microstructures. However, the efficiency and accuracy in the multi-parametric estimations are still limited since previous studies tend to estimate multi-parametric maps with dense sampling and isolated signal modeling. This paper proposes DeepMpMRI, a unified framework for fast and high-fidelity multi-parametric estimation from various diffusion models using sparsely sampled q-space data. DeepMpMRI is equipped with a newly designed tensor-decomposition-based regularizer to effectively capture fine details by exploiting the correlation across parameters. In addition, we introduce a Nesterov-based adaptive learning algorithm that optimizes the regularization parameter dynamically to enhance the performance. DeepMpMRI is an extendable framework capable of incorporating flexible network architecture. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over 5 state-of-the-art methods in simultaneously estimating multi-parametric maps for various diffusion models with fine-grained details both quantitatively and qualitatively, achieving 4.5 - 22.5$\times$ acceleration compared to the dense sampling of a total of 270 diffusion gradients.

AID-DTI: Accelerating High-fidelity Diffusion Tensor Imaging with Detail-Preserving Model-based Deep Learning

Deep learning has shown great potential in accelerating diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). Nevertheless, existing methods tend to suffer from Rician noise and detail loss in reconstructing the DTI-derived parametric maps especially when sparsely sampled q-space data are used. This paper proposes a novel method, AID-DTI (Accelerating hIgh fiDelity Diffusion Tensor Imaging), to facilitate fast and accurate DTI with only six measurements. AID-DTI is equipped with a newly designed Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)-based regularizer, which can effectively capture fine details while suppressing noise during network training. Experimental results on Human Connectome Project (HCP) data consistently demonstrate that the proposed method estimates DTI parameter maps with fine-grained details and outperforms three state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Knowledge-guided Semantic Computing Network

It is very useful to integrate human knowledge and experience into traditional neural networks for faster learning speed, fewer training samples and better interpretability. However, due to the obscured and indescribable black box model of neural networks, it is very difficult to design its architecture, interpret its features and predict its performance. Inspired by human visual cognition process, we propose a knowledge-guided semantic computing network which includes two modules: a knowledge-guided semantic tree and a data-driven neural network. The semantic tree is pre-defined to describe the spatial structural relations of different semantics, which just corresponds to the tree-like description of objects based on human knowledge. The object recognition process through the semantic tree only needs simple forward computing without training. Besides, to enhance the recognition ability of the semantic tree in aspects of the diversity, randomicity and variability, we use the traditional neural network to aid the semantic tree to learn some indescribable features. Only in this case, the training process is needed. The experimental results on MNIST and GTSRB datasets show that compared with the traditional data-driven network, our proposed semantic computing network can achieve better performance with fewer training samples and lower computational complexity. Especially, Our model also has better adversarial robustness than traditional neural network with the help of human knowledge.