Title
Learning Implicit Brain MRI Manifolds with Deep Learning.
Abstract
An important task in image processing and neuroimaging is to extract quantitative info nation from the acquired images in order to make observations about the presence of disease or markers of development in populations. Having a low dimensional manifold of an image allows for easier statistical comparisons between groups and the synthesis of group representatives. Previous studies have sought to identify the best mapping of brain MRI to a low-dimensional manifold, but have been limited by assumptions of explicit similarity measures. In this work, we use deep learning techniques to investigate implicit manifolds of normal brains and generate new, high-quality images. We explore implicit manifolds by addressing the problems of image synthesis and image denoising as important tools in manifold learning. First, we propose the unsupervised synthesis of T1-weighted brain MRI using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) by learning from 528 examples of 2D axial slices of brain MRI. Synthesized images were first shown to be unique by perfouning a cross correlation with the training set. Real and synthesized images were then assessed in a blinded manner by two imaging experts providing an image quality score of 1-5. The quality score of the synthetic image showed substantial overlap with that of the real images. Moreover, we use an autoencoder with skip connections for image denoising, showing that the proposed method results in higher PSNR than FSL SUSAN after denoising. This work shows the power of artificial networks to synthesize realistic imaging data, which can be used to improve image processing techniques and provide a quantitative framework to structural changes in the brain.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1117/12.2293515
Proceedings of SPIE
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Manifold learning,deep neural networks,image synthesis,brain MRI,generative adversarial networks
Conference
10574
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0277-786X
4
0.38
References 
Authors
7
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Camilo Bermudez1323.09
Andrew J Plassard2356.95
Larry T. Davis340.38
Allen Newton4174.37
Susan M Resnick564172.81
Bennett A. Landman670074.20