High‐fidelity direct contrast synthesis from magnetic resonance fingerprinting

作者：Ke Wang, Mariya Doneva, Jakob Meineke, Thomas Amthor, Ekin Karasan, Fei Tan, Jonathan I. Tamir, Stella X. Yu, Michael Lustig · 发表于：Magnetic Resonance in Medicine · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.1002/mrm.29766 · 被引用次数：26 · 研究领域：Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis、Advanced MRI Techniques and Applications、Functional Brain Connectivity Studies

PURPOSE: This work was aimed at proposing a supervised learning-based method that directly synthesizes contrast-weighted images from the Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF) data without performing quantitative mapping and spin-dynamics simulations. METHODS: To implement our direct contrast synthesis (DCS) method, we deploy a conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) framework with a multi-branch U-Net as the generator and a multilayer CNN (PatchGAN) as the discriminator. We refer to our proposed approach as N-DCSNet. The input MRF data are used to directly synthesize T1-weighted, T2-weighted, and fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) images through supervised training on paired MRF and target spin echo-based contrast-weighted scans. The performance of our proposed method is demonstrated on in vivo MRF scans from healthy volunteers. Quantitative metrics, including normalized root mean square error (nRMSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity (SSIM), learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS), and Fréchet inception distance (FID), were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method and compare it with others. RESULTS: In-vivo experiments demonstrated excellent image quality with respect to that of simulation-based contrast synthesis and previous DCS methods, both visually and according to quantitative metrics. We also demonstrate cases in which our trained model is able to mitigate the in-flow and spiral off-resonance artifa...