IR2QSM: Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping via Deep Neural Networks with Iterative Reverse Concatenations and Recurrent Modules

Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) is an MRI phase-based post-processing technique to extract the distribution of tissue susceptibilities, demonstrating significant potential in studying neurological diseases. However, the ill-conditioned nature of dipole inversion makes QSM reconstruction from the tissue field prone to noise and artifacts. In this work, we propose a novel deep learning-based IR2QSM method for QSM reconstruction. It is designed by iterating four times of a reverse concatenations and middle recurrent modules enhanced U-net, which could dramatically improve the efficiency of latent feature utilization. Simulated and in vivo experiments were conducted to compare IR2QSM with several traditional algorithms (MEDI and iLSQR) and state-of-the-art deep learning methods (U-net, xQSM, and LPCNN). The results indicated that IR2QSM was able to obtain QSM images with significantly increased accuracy and mitigated artifacts over other methods. Particularly, IR2QSM demonstrated on average the best NRMSE (27.59%) in simulated experiments, which is 15.48%, 7.86%, 17.24%, 9.26%, and 29.13% lower than iLSQR, MEDI, U-net, xQSM, LPCNN, respectively, and led to improved QSM results with fewer artifacts for the in vivo data.

Plug-and-Play Latent Feature Editing for Orientation-Adaptive Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping Neural Networks

Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) is a post-processing technique for deriving tissue magnetic susceptibility distribution from MRI phase measurements. Deep learning (DL) algorithms hold great potential for solving the ill-posed QSM reconstruction problem. However, a significant challenge facing current DL-QSM approaches is their limited adaptability to magnetic dipole field orientation variations during training and testing. In this work, we propose a novel Orientation-Adaptive Latent Feature Editing (OA-LFE) module to learn the encoding of acquisition orientation vectors and seamlessly integrate them into the latent features of deep networks. Importantly, it can be directly Plug-and-Play (PnP) into various existing DL-QSM architectures, enabling reconstructions of QSM from arbitrary magnetic dipole orientations. Its effectiveness is demonstrated by combining the OA-LFE module into our previously proposed phase-to-susceptibility single-step instant QSM (iQSM) network, which was initially tailored for pure-axial acquisitions. The proposed OA-LFE-empowered iQSM, which we refer to as iQSM+, is trained in a self-supervised manner on a specially-designed simulation brain dataset. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on simulated and in vivo human brain datasets, encompassing subjects ranging from healthy individuals to those with pathological conditions. These experiments involve various MRI platforms (3T and 7T) and aim to compare our proposed iQSM+ against several established QSM reconstruction frameworks, including the original iQSM. The iQSM+ yields QSM images with significantly improved accuracies and mitigates artifacts, surpassing other state-of-the-art DL-QSM algorithms.

Multi-Head Attention Mechanism Learning for Cancer New Subtypes and Treatment Based on Cancer Multi-Omics Data

Due to the high heterogeneity and clinical characteristics of cancer, there are significant differences in multi-omics data and clinical features among subtypes of different cancers. Therefore, the identification and discovery of cancer subtypes are crucial for the diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of cancer. In this study, we proposed a generalization framework based on attention mechanisms for unsupervised contrastive learning (AMUCL) to analyze cancer multi-omics data for the identification and characterization of cancer subtypes. AMUCL framework includes a unsupervised multi-head attention mechanism, which deeply extracts multi-omics data features. Importantly, a decoupled contrastive learning model (DMACL) based on a multi-head attention mechanism is proposed to learn multi-omics data features and clusters and identify new cancer subtypes. This unsupervised contrastive learning method clusters subtypes by calculating the similarity between samples in the feature space and sample space of multi-omics data. Compared to 11 other deep learning models, the DMACL model achieved a C-index of 0.002, a Silhouette score of 0.801, and a Davies Bouldin Score of 0.38 on a single-cell multi-omics dataset. On a cancer multi-omics dataset, the DMACL model obtained a C-index of 0.016, a Silhouette score of 0.688, and a Davies Bouldin Score of 0.46, and obtained the most reliable cancer subtype clustering results for each type of cancer. Finally, we used the DMACL model in the AMUCL framework to reveal six cancer subtypes of AML. By analyzing the GO functional enrichment, subtype-specific biological functions, and GSEA of AML, we further enhanced the interpretability of cancer subtype analysis based on the generalizable AMUCL framework.