Correcting Susceptibility Artifacts of MRI Sensors in Brain Scanning: A 3D Anatomy-Guided Deep Learning Approach

<div><p>Echo planar imaging (EPI), a fast magnetic resonance imaging technique, is a powerful tool in functional neuroimaging studies. However, susceptibility artifacts, which cause misinterpretations of brain functions, are unavoidable distortions in EPI. This paper proposes an end-to-e...

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Main Author: Soan T. M. Duong (18460599) (author)
Other Authors: Son Lam Phung (18460602) (author), Abdesselam Bouzerdoum (17900021) (author), Sui Paul Ang (18460605) (author), Mark M. Schira (7817429) (author)
Published: 2021
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Summary:<div><p>Echo planar imaging (EPI), a fast magnetic resonance imaging technique, is a powerful tool in functional neuroimaging studies. However, susceptibility artifacts, which cause misinterpretations of brain functions, are unavoidable distortions in EPI. This paper proposes an end-to-end deep learning framework, named TS-Net, for susceptibility artifact correction (SAC) in a pair of 3D EPI images with reversed phase-encoding directions. The proposed TS-Net comprises a deep convolutional network to predict a displacement field in three dimensions to overcome the limitation of existing methods, which only estimate the displacement field along the dominant-distortion direction. In the training phase, anatomical T1-weighted images are leveraged to regularize the correction, but they are not required during the inference phase to make TS-Net more flexible for general use. The experimental results show that TS-Net achieves favorable accuracy and speed trade-off when compared with the state-of-the-art SAC methods, i.e., TOPUP, TISAC, and S-Net. The fast inference speed (less than a second) of TS-Net makes real-time SAC during EPI image acquisition feasible and accelerates the medical image-processing pipelines.</p><p> </p></div><h2>Other Information</h2> <p> Published in: Sensors<br> License: <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</a><br>See article on publisher's website: <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21072314" target="_blank">https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21072314</a></p>