A Multi-Channel Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Resolution Network for MR to CT Synthesis

Synthesising computed tomography (CT) images from magnetic resonance images (MRI) plays an important role in the field of medical image analysis, both for quantification and diagnostic purposes. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art results in image-to-image translation...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kerstin Klaser, Pedro Borges, Richard Shaw, Marta Ranzini, Marc Modat, David Atkinson, Kris Thielemans, Brian Hutton, Vicky Goh, Gary Cook, Jorge Cardoso, Sebastien Ourselin
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021-02-01
Series:Applied Sciences
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Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/4/1667
Description
Summary:Synthesising computed tomography (CT) images from magnetic resonance images (MRI) plays an important role in the field of medical image analysis, both for quantification and diagnostic purposes. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art results in image-to-image translation for brain applications. However, synthesising whole-body images remains largely uncharted territory, involving many challenges, including large image size and limited field of view, complex spatial context, and anatomical differences between images acquired at different times. We propose the use of an uncertainty-aware multi-channel multi-resolution 3D cascade network specifically aiming for whole-body MR to CT synthesis. The Mean Absolute Error on the synthetic CT generated with the MultiRes<inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mrow></mrow><mrow><mi>u</mi><mi>n</mi><mi>c</mi></mrow></msub></semantics></math></inline-formula> network (73.90 HU) is compared to multiple baseline CNNs like 3D U-Net (92.89 HU), HighRes3DNet (89.05 HU) and deep boosted regression (77.58 HU) and shows superior synthesis performance. We ultimately exploit the extrapolation properties of the MultiRes networks on sub-regions of the body.
ISSN:2076-3417