arXiv subjects

Dianlin Hu

Publications and source records attributed to Dianlin Hu.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

A Deep Learning-Based Method for Metal Artifact-Resistant Syn-MP-RAGE Contrast Synthesis

In certain brain volumetric studies, synthetic T1-weighted magnetization-prepared rapid gradient-echo (MP-RAGE) contrast, derived from quantitative T1 MRI (T1-qMRI), proves highly valuable due to its clear white/gray matter boundaries for brain segmentation. However, generating synthetic MP-RAGE (syn-MP-RAGE) typically requires pairs of high-quality, artifact-free, multi-modality inputs, which can be challenging in retrospective studies, where missing or corrupted data is common. To overcome this limitation, our research explores the feasibility of employing a deep learning-based approach to synthesize syn-MP-RAGE contrast directly from a single channel turbo spin-echo (TSE) input, renowned for its resistance to metal artifacts. We evaluated this deep learning-based synthetic MP-RAGE (DL-Syn-MPR) on 31 non-artifact and 11 metal-artifact subjects. The segmentation results, measured by the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), consistently achieved high agreement (DSC values above 0.83), indicating a strong correlation with reference segmentations, with lower input requirements. Also, no significant difference in segmentation performance was observed between the artifact and non-artifact groups.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2021

Stabilizing Deep Tomographic Reconstruction

Tomographic image reconstruction with deep learning is an emerging field, but a recent landmark study reveals that several deep reconstruction networks are unstable for computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Specifically, three kinds of instabilities were reported: (1) strong image artefacts from tiny perturbations, (2) small features missing in a deeply reconstructed image, and (3) decreased imaging performance with increased input data. On the other hand, compressed sensing (CS) inspired reconstruction methods do not suffer from these instabilities because of their built-in kernel awareness. For deep reconstruction to realize its full potential and become a mainstream approach for tomographic imaging, it is thus critically important to meet this challenge by stabilizing deep reconstruction networks. Here we propose an Analytic Compressed Iterative Deep (ACID) framework to address this challenge. ACID synergizes a deep reconstruction network trained on big data, kernel awareness from CS-inspired processing, and iterative refinement to minimize the data residual relative to real measurement. Our study demonstrates that the deep reconstruction using ACID is accurate and stable, and sheds light on the converging mechanism of the ACID iteration under a Bounded Relative Error Norm (BREN) condition. In particular, the study shows that ACID-based reconstruction is resilient against adversarial attacks, superior to classic sparsity-regularized reconstruction alone, and eliminates the three kinds of instabilities. We anticipate that this integrative data-driven approach will help promote development and translation of deep tomographic image reconstruction networks into clinical applications.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2021

Deep Learning based Spectral CT Imaging

Spectral computed tomography (CT) has attracted much attention in radiation dose reduction, metal artifacts removal, tissue quantification and material discrimination. The x-ray energy spectrum is divided into several bins, each energy-bin-specific projection has a low signal-noise-ratio (SNR) than the current-integrating counterpart, which makes image reconstruction a unique challenge. Traditional wisdom is to use prior knowledge based iterative methods. However, this kind of methods demands a great computational cost. Inspired by deep learning, here we first develop a deep learning based reconstruction method; i.e., U-net with L_p^p-norm, Total variation, Residual learning, and Anisotropic adaption (ULTRA). Specifically, we emphasize the Various Multi-scale Feature Fusion and Multichannel Filtering Enhancement with a denser connection encoding architecture for residual learning and feature fusion. To address the image deblurring problem associated with the $L_2^2$-loss, we propose a general $L_p^p$-loss, $p>0$ Furthermore, the images from different energy bins share similar structures of the same object, the regularization characterizing correlations of different energy bins is incorporated into the $L_p^p$-loss function, which helps unify the deep learning based methods with traditional compressed sensing based methods. Finally, the anisotropically weighted total variation is employed to characterize the sparsity in the spatial-spectral domain to regularize the proposed network. In particular, we validate our ULTRA networks on three large-scale spectral CT datasets, and obtain excellent results relative to the competing algorithms. In conclusion, our quantitative and qualitative results in numerical simulation and preclinical experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach is accurate, efficient and robust for high-quality spectral CT image reconstruction.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2021

Deep Iteration Assisted by Multi-level Obey-pixel Network Discriminator (DIAMOND) for Medical Image Recovery

Image restoration is a typical ill-posed problem, and it contains various tasks. In the medical imaging field, an ill-posed image interrupts diagnosis and even following image processing. Both traditional iterative and up-to-date deep networks have attracted much attention and obtained a significant improvement in reconstructing satisfying images. This study combines their advantages into one unified mathematical model and proposes a general image restoration strategy to deal with such problems. This strategy consists of two modules. First, a novel generative adversarial net(GAN) with WGAN-GP training is built to recover image structures and subtle details. Then, a deep iteration module promotes image quality with a combination of pre-trained deep networks and compressed sensing algorithms by ADMM optimization. (D)eep (I)teration module suppresses image artifacts and further recovers subtle image details, (A)ssisted by (M)ulti-level (O)bey-pixel feature extraction networks (D)iscriminator to recover general structures. Therefore, the proposed strategy is named DIAMOND.

eess.IV↗