Investigating the Feasibility of Patch-based Inference for Generalized Diffusion Priors in Inverse Problems for Medical Images

Plug-and-play approaches to solving inverse problems such as restoration and super-resolution have recently benefited from Diffusion-based generative priors for natural as well as medical images. However, solutions often use the standard albeit computationally intensive route of training and inferring with the whole image on the diffusion prior. While patch-based approaches to evaluating diffusion priors in plug-and-play methods have received some interest, they remain an open area of study. In this work, we explore the feasibility of the usage of patches for training and inference of a diffusion prior on MRI images. We explore the minor adaptation necessary for artifact avoidance, the performance and the efficiency of memory usage of patch-based methods as well as the adaptability of whole image training to patch-based evaluation - evaluating across multiple plug-and-play methods, tasks and datasets.

End-to-end Segmentation with Recurrent Attention Neural Network

Image segmentation quality depends heavily on the quality of the image. For many medical imaging modalities, image reconstruction is required to convert acquired raw data to images before any analysis. However, imperfect reconstruction with artifacts and loss of information is almost inevitable, which compromises the final performance of segmentation. In this study, we present a novel end-to-end deep learning framework that performs magnetic resonance brain image segmentation directly from the raw data. The end-to-end framework consists a unique task-driven attention module that recurrently utilizes intermediate segmentation result to facilitate image-domain feature extraction from the raw data for segmentation, thus closely bridging the reconstruction and the segmentation tasks. In addition, we introduce a novel workflow to generate labeled training data for segmentation by exploiting imaging modality simulators and digital phantoms. Extensive experiment results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.