Tuning-free multi-coil compressed sensing MRI with Parallel Variable Density Approximate Message Passing

Purpose: To develop a tuning-free method for multi-coil compressed sensing MRI that performs competitively with algorithms with an optimally tuned sparse parameter. Theory: The Parallel Variable Density Approximate Message Passing (P-VDAMP) algorithm is proposed. For Bernoulli random variable density sampling, P-VDAMP obeys a "state evolution", where the intermediate per-iteration image estimate is distributed according to the ground truth corrupted by a Gaussian vector with approximately known covariance. State evolution is leveraged to automatically tune sparse parameters on-the-fly with Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimate (SURE). Methods: P-VDAMP is evaluated on brain, knee and angiogram datasets at acceleration factors 5 and 10 and compared with four variants of the Fast Iterative Shrinkage-Thresholding algorithm (FISTA), including two tuning-free variants from the literature. Results: The proposed method is found to have a similar reconstruction quality and time to convergence as FISTA with an optimally tuned sparse weighting. Conclusions: P-VDAMP is an efficient, robust and principled method for on-the-fly parameter tuning that is competitive with optimally tuned FISTA and offers substantial robustness and reconstruction quality improvements over competing tuning-free methods.

Automated detection and quantification of COVID-19 airspace disease on chest radiographs: A novel approach achieving radiologist-level performance using a CNN trained on digital reconstructed radiographs (DRRs) from CT-based ground-truth

Purpose: To leverage volumetric quantification of airspace disease (AD) derived from a superior modality (CT) serving as ground truth, projected onto digitally reconstructed radiographs (DRRs) to: 1) train a convolutional neural network to quantify airspace disease on paired CXRs; and 2) compare the DRR-trained CNN to expert human readers in the CXR evaluation of patients with confirmed COVID-19. Materials and Methods: We retrospectively selected a cohort of 86 COVID-19 patients (with positive RT-PCR), from March-May 2020 at a tertiary hospital in the northeastern USA, who underwent chest CT and CXR within 48 hrs. The ground truth volumetric percentage of COVID-19 related AD (POv) was established by manual AD segmentation on CT. The resulting 3D masks were projected into 2D anterior-posterior digitally reconstructed radiographs (DRR) to compute area-based AD percentage (POa). A convolutional neural network (CNN) was trained with DRR images generated from a larger-scale CT dataset of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients, automatically segmenting lungs, AD and quantifying POa on CXR. CNN POa results were compared to POa quantified on CXR by two expert readers and to the POv ground-truth, by computing correlations and mean absolute errors. Results: Bootstrap mean absolute error (MAE) and correlations between POa and POv were 11.98% [11.05%-12.47%] and 0.77 [0.70-0.82] for average of expert readers, and 9.56%-9.78% [8.83%-10.22%] and 0.78-0.81 [0.73-0.85] for the CNN, respectively. Conclusion: Our CNN trained with DRR using CT-derived airspace quantification achieved expert radiologist level of accuracy in the quantification of airspace disease on CXR, in patients with positive RT-PCR for COVID-19.