This study introduces a novel zero-shot scan-specific self-supervised reconstruction method for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to reduce scan times. Conventional supervised reconstruction methods require large amounts of fully-sampled reference data, which is often impractical to obtain and can lead to artifacts by overly emphasizing learned patterns. Existing zero-shot scan-specific methods have attempted to overcome this data dependency but show limited performance due to insufficient utilization of k-space information and constraints derived from MRI forward model. To address these limitations, we introduce a framework utilizing all acquired k-space measurements for both network inputs and training targets. While this framework suffers from training instability, we resolve these challenges through three key components: an Attention-guided K-space Selective Mechanism (AKSM) that provides indirect constraints for non-sampled k-space points, Iteration-wise K-space Masking (IKM) that enhances training stability, and a robust sensitivity map estimation model utilizing cross-channel constraint that performs effectively even at high reduction factors. Experimental results on the FastMRI knee and brain datasets with reduction factors of 4 and 8 demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior reconstruction quality and faster convergence compared to existing zero-shot scan-specific methods, making it suitable for practical clinical applications. The implementation of our proposed method is publicly available at https://github.com/joojinho97/AeSPa.git.

Recent advances in deep learning-based medical image segmentation studies achieve nearly human-level performance in fully supervised manner. However, acquiring pixel-level expert annotations is extremely expensive and laborious in medical imaging fields. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) can alleviate this problem, which makes it possible to use annotated data in one imaging modality to train a network that can successfully perform segmentation on target imaging modality with no labels. In this work, we propose SDC-UDA, a simple yet effective volumetric UDA framework for Slice-Direction Continuous cross-modality medical image segmentation which combines intra- and inter-slice self-attentive image translation, uncertainty-constrained pseudo-label refinement, and volumetric self-training. Our method is distinguished from previous methods on UDA for medical image segmentation in that it can obtain continuous segmentation in the slice direction, thereby ensuring higher accuracy and potential in clinical practice. We validate SDC-UDA with multiple publicly available cross-modality medical image segmentation datasets and achieve state-of-the-art segmentation performance, not to mention the superior slice-direction continuity of prediction compared to previous studies.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can provide diagnostic information with high-resolution and high-contrast images. However, MRI requires a relatively long scan time compared to other medical imaging techniques, where long scan time might occur patient’s discomfort and limit the increase in resolution of magnetic resonance (MR) image. In this study, we propose a Joint Deep Model-based MR Image and Coil Sensitivity Reconstruction Network, called Joint-ICNet, which jointly reconstructs an MR image and coil sensitivity maps from undersampled multi-coil k-space data using deep learning networks combined with MR physical models. Joint-ICNet has two main blocks, where one is an MR image reconstruction block that reconstructs an MR image from undersampled multi-coil k-space data and the other is a coil sensitivity maps reconstruction block that estimates coil sensitivity maps from undersampled multi-coil k-space data. The desired MR image and coil sensitivity maps can be obtained by sequentially estimating them with two blocks based on the unrolled network architecture. To demonstrate the performance of Joint-ICNet, we performed experiments with a fastMRI brain dataset for two reduction factors (R = 4 and 8). With qualitative and quantitative results, we demonstrate that our proposed Joint-ICNet outperforms conventional parallel imaging and deep-learning-based methods in reconstructing MR images from undersampled multi-coil k-space data.

With increasing fields of application for neural networks and the development of neural networks, the ability to explain deep learning models is also becoming increasingly important. Especially, prior to practical applications, it is crucial to analyze a model’s inference and the process of generating the results. A common explanation method is Class Activation Mapping(CAM) based method where it is often used to understand the last layer of the convolutional neural networks popular in the field of Computer Vision. In this paper, we propose a novel CAM method named Relevance-weighted Class Activation Mapping(Relevance-CAM) that utilizes Layer-wise Relevance Propagation to obtain the weighting components. This allows the explanation map to be faithful and robust to the shattered gradient problem, a shared problem of the gradient based CAM methods that causes noisy saliency maps for intermediate layers. Therefore, our proposed method can better explain a model by correctly analyzing the intermediate layers as well as the last convolutional layer. In this paper, we visualize how each layer of the popular image processing models extracts class specific features using Relevance-CAM, evaluate the localization ability, and show why the gradient based CAM cannot be used to explain the intermediate layers, proven by experimenting the weighting component. Relevance-CAM outperforms other CAM-based methods in recognition and localization evaluation in layers of any depth. The source code is available at: https://github.com/mongeoroo/Relevance-CAM