Deep Learning for Highly Accelerated Diffusion Tensor Imaging

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is widely used to examine the human brain white matter structures, including their microarchitecture integrity and spatial fiber tract trajectories, with clinical applications in several neurological disorders and neurosurgical guidance. However, a major factor that prevents DTI from being incorporated in clinical routines is its long scan time due to the acquisition of a large number (typically 30 or more) of diffusion-weighted images (DWIs) required for reliable tensor estimation. Here, a deep learning-based technique is developed to obtain diffusion tensor images with only six DWIs, resulting in a significant reduction in imaging time. The method uses deep convolutional neural networks to learn the highly nonlinear relationship between DWIs and several tensor-derived maps, bypassing the conventional tensor fitting procedure, which is well known to be highly susceptible to noises in DWIs. The performance of the method was evaluated using DWI datasets from the Human Connectome Project and patients with ischemic stroke. Our results demonstrate that the proposed technique is able to generate quantitative maps of good quality fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD), as well as the fiber tractography from as few as six DWIs. The proposed method achieves a quantification error of less than 5% in all regions of interest of the brain, which is the rate of in vivo reproducibility of diffusion tensor imaging. Tractography reconstruction is also comparable to the ground truth obtained from 90 DWIs. In addition, we also demonstrate that the neural network trained on healthy volunteers can be directly applied/tested on stroke patients' DWIs data without compromising the lesion detectability. Such a significant reduction in scan time will allow inclusion of DTI into clinical routine for many potential applications.