Physics-Coupled Neural Network Magnetic Resonance Electrical Property Tomography (MREPT) for Conductivity Reconstruction

The electrical property (EP) of human tissues is a quantitative biomarker that facilitates early diagnosis of cancerous tissues. Magnetic resonance electrical properties tomography (MREPT) is an imaging modality that reconstructs EPs by the radio-frequency field in an MRI system. MREPT reconstructs EPs by solving analytic models numerically based on Maxwell's equations. Most MREPT methods suffer from artifacts caused by inaccuracy of the hypotheses behind the models, and/or numerical errors. These artifacts can be mitigated by adding coefficients to stabilize the models, however, the selection of such coefficient has been empirical, which limit its medical application. Alternatively, end-to-end Neural networks-based MREPT (NN-MREPT) learns to reconstruct the EPs from training samples, circumventing Maxwell's equations. However, due to its pattern-matching nature, it is difficult for NN-MREPT to produce accurate reconstructions for new samples. In this work, we proposed a physics-coupled NN for MREPT (PCNN-MREPT), in which an analytic model, cr-MREPT, works with diffusion and convection coefficients, learned by NNs from the difference between the reconstructed and ground-truth EPs to reduce artifacts. With two simulated datasets, three generalization experiments in which test samples deviate gradually from the training samples, and one noise-robustness experiment were conducted. The results show that the proposed PCNN-MREPT achieves higher accuracy than two representative analytic methods. Moreover, compared with an end-to-end NN-MREPT, the proposed method attained higher accuracy in two critical generalization tests. This is an important step to practical MREPT medical diagnoses.

Saliency Fusion in Eigenvector Space with Multi-Channel Pulse Coupled Neural Network

Saliency computation has become a popular research field for many applications due to the useful information provided by saliency maps. For a saliency map, local relations around the salient regions in multi-channel perspective should be taken into consideration by aiming uniformity on the region of interest as an internal approach. And, irrelevant salient regions have to be avoided as much as possible. Most of the works achieve these criteria with external processing modules; however, these can be accomplished during the conspicuity map fusion process. Therefore, in this paper, a new model is proposed for saliency/conspicuity map fusion with two concepts: a) input image transformation relying on the principal component analysis (PCA), and b) saliency conspicuity map fusion with multi-channel pulsed coupled neural network (m-PCNN). Experimental results, which are evaluated by precision, recall, F-measure, and area under curve (AUC), support the reliability of the proposed method by enhancing the saliency computation.