Trustworthy Contrast-enhanced Brain MRI Synthesis

Contrast-enhanced brain MRI (CE-MRI) is a valuable diagnostic technique but may pose health risks and incur high costs. To create safer alternatives, multi-modality medical image translation aims to synthesize CE-MRI images from other available modalities. Although existing methods can generate promising predictions, they still face two challenges, i.e., exhibiting over-confidence and lacking interpretability on predictions. To address the above challenges, this paper introduces TrustI2I, a novel trustworthy method that reformulates multi-to-one medical image translation problem as a multimodal regression problem, aiming to build an uncertainty-aware and reliable system. Specifically, our method leverages deep evidential regression to estimate prediction uncertainties and employs an explicit intermediate and late fusion strategy based on the Mixture of Normal Inverse Gamma (MoNIG) distribution, enhancing both synthesis quality and interpretability. Additionally, we incorporate uncertainty calibration to improve the reliability of uncertainty. Validation on the BraTS2018 dataset demonstrates that our approach surpasses current methods, producing higher-quality images with rational uncertainty estimation.

CMRxRecon2024: A Multi-Modality, Multi-View K-Space Dataset Boosting Universal Machine Learning for Accelerated Cardiac MRI

Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has emerged as a clinically gold-standard technique for diagnosing cardiac diseases, thanks to its ability to provide diverse information with multiple modalities and anatomical views. Accelerated cardiac MRI is highly expected to achieve time-efficient and patient-friendly imaging, and then advanced image reconstruction approaches are required to recover high-quality, clinically interpretable images from undersampled measurements. However, the lack of publicly available cardiac MRI k-space dataset in terms of both quantity and diversity has severely hindered substantial technological progress, particularly for data-driven artificial intelligence. Here, we provide a standardized, diverse, and high-quality CMRxRecon2024 dataset to facilitate the technical development, fair evaluation, and clinical transfer of cardiac MRI reconstruction approaches, towards promoting the universal frameworks that enable fast and robust reconstructions across different cardiac MRI protocols in clinical practice. To the best of our knowledge, the CMRxRecon2024 dataset is the largest and most diverse publicly available cardiac k-space dataset. It is acquired from 330 healthy volunteers, covering commonly used modalities, anatomical views, and acquisition trajectories in clinical cardiac MRI workflows. Besides, an open platform with tutorials, benchmarks, and data processing tools is provided to facilitate data usage, advanced method development, and fair performance evaluation.

Evidential Concept Embedding Models: Towards Reliable Concept Explanations for Skin Disease Diagnosis

Due to the high stakes in medical decision-making, there is a compelling demand for interpretable deep learning methods in medical image analysis. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBM) have emerged as an active interpretable framework incorporating human-interpretable concepts into decision-making. However, their concept predictions may lack reliability when applied to clinical diagnosis, impeding concept explanations' quality. To address this, we propose an evidential Concept Embedding Model (evi-CEM), which employs evidential learning to model the concept uncertainty. Additionally, we offer to leverage the concept uncertainty to rectify concept misalignments that arise when training CBMs using vision-language models without complete concept supervision. With the proposed methods, we can enhance concept explanations' reliability for both supervised and label-efficient settings. Furthermore, we introduce concept uncertainty for effective test-time intervention. Our evaluation demonstrates that evi-CEM achieves superior performance in terms of concept prediction, and the proposed concept rectification effectively mitigates concept misalignments for label-efficient training. Our code is available at https://github.com/obiyoag/evi-CEM.

Toward Universal Medical Image Registration via Sharpness-Aware Meta-Continual Learning

Current deep learning approaches in medical image registration usually face the challenges of distribution shift and data collection, hindering real-world deployment. In contrast, universal medical image registration aims to perform registration on a wide range of clinically relevant tasks simultaneously, thus having tremendous potential for clinical applications. In this paper, we present the first attempt to achieve the goal of universal 3D medical image registration in sequential learning scenarios by proposing a continual learning method. Specifically, we utilize meta-learning with experience replay to mitigating the problem of catastrophic forgetting. To promote the generalizability of meta-continual learning, we further propose sharpness-aware meta-continual learning (SAMCL). We validate the effectiveness of our method on four datasets in a continual learning setup, including brain MR, abdomen CT, lung CT, and abdomen MR-CT image pairs. Results have shown the potential of SAMCL in realizing universal image registration, which performs better than or on par with vanilla sequential or centralized multi-task training strategies.The source code will be available from https://github.com/xzluo97/Continual-Reg.

MERIT: Multi-view Evidential learning for Reliable and Interpretable liver fibrosis sTaging

Accurate staging of liver fibrosis from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is crucial in clinical practice. While conventional methods often focus on a specific sub-region, multi-view learning captures more information by analyzing multiple patches simultaneously. However, previous multi-view approaches could not typically calculate uncertainty by nature, and they generally integrate features from different views in a black-box fashion, hence compromising reliability as well as interpretability of the resulting models. In this work, we propose a new multi-view method based on evidential learning, referred to as MERIT, which tackles the two challenges in a unified framework. MERIT enables uncertainty quantification of the predictions to enhance reliability, and employs a logic-based combination rule to improve interpretability. Specifically, MERIT models the prediction from each sub-view as an opinion with quantified uncertainty under the guidance of the subjective logic theory. Furthermore, a distribution-aware base rate is introduced to enhance performance, particularly in scenarios involving class distribution shifts. Finally, MERIT adopts a feature-specific combination rule to explicitly fuse multi-view predictions, thereby enhancing interpretability. Results have showcased the effectiveness of the proposed MERIT, highlighting the reliability and offering both ad-hoc and post-hoc interpretability. They also illustrate that MERIT can elucidate the significance of each view in the decision-making process for liver fibrosis staging.

The state-of-the-art in Cardiac MRI Reconstruction: Results of the CMRxRecon Challenge in MICCAI 2023

Cardiac MRI, crucial for evaluating heart structure and function, faces limitations like slow imaging and motion artifacts. Undersampling reconstruction, especially data-driven algorithms, has emerged as a promising solution to accelerate scans and enhance imaging performance using highly under-sampled data. Nevertheless, the scarcity of publicly available cardiac k-space datasets and evaluation platform hinder the development of data-driven reconstruction algorithms. To address this issue, we organized the Cardiac MRI Reconstruction Challenge (CMRxRecon) in 2023, in collaboration with the 26th International Conference on MICCAI. CMRxRecon presented an extensive k-space dataset comprising cine and mapping raw data, accompanied by detailed annotations of cardiac anatomical structures. With overwhelming participation, the challenge attracted more than 285 teams and over 600 participants. Among them, 22 teams successfully submitted Docker containers for the testing phase, with 7 teams submitted for both cine and mapping tasks. All teams use deep learning based approaches, indicating that deep learning has predominately become a promising solution for the problem. The first-place winner of both tasks utilizes the E2E-VarNet architecture as backbones. In contrast, U-Net is still the most popular backbone for both multi-coil and single-coil reconstructions. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the challenge design, presents a summary of the submitted results, reviews the employed methods, and offers an in-depth discussion that aims to inspire future advancements in cardiac MRI reconstruction models. The summary emphasizes the effective strategies observed in Cardiac MRI reconstruction, including backbone architecture, loss function, pre-processing techniques, physical modeling, and model complexity, thereby providing valuable insights for further developments in this field.

Bayesian Intrinsic Groupwise Image Registration: Unsupervised Disentanglement of Anatomy and Geometry

This article presents a general Bayesian learning framework for multi-modal groupwise registration on medical images. The method builds on probabilistic modelling of the image generative process, where the underlying common anatomy and geometric variations of the observed images are explicitly disentangled as latent variables. Thus, groupwise registration is achieved through the solution to Bayesian inference. We propose a novel hierarchical variational auto-encoding architecture to realize the inference procedure of the latent variables, where the registration parameters can be calculated in a mathematically interpretable fashion. Remarkably, this new paradigm can learn groupwise registration in an unsupervised closed-loop self-reconstruction process, sparing the burden of designing complex intensity-based similarity measures. The computationally efficient disentangled architecture is also inherently scalable and flexible, allowing for groupwise registration on large-scale image groups with variable sizes. Furthermore, the inferred structural representations from disentanglement learning are capable of capturing the latent anatomy of the observations with visual semantics. Extensive experiments were conducted to validate the proposed framework, including four datasets from cardiac, brain and abdominal medical images. The results have demonstrated the superiority of our method over conventional similarity-based approaches in terms of accuracy, efficiency, scalability and interpretability.

CMRxRecon: An open cardiac MRI dataset for the competition of accelerated image reconstruction

Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) has emerged as a valuable diagnostic tool for cardiac diseases. However, a limitation of CMR is its slow imaging speed, which causes patient discomfort and introduces artifacts in the images. There has been growing interest in deep learning-based CMR imaging algorithms that can reconstruct high-quality images from highly under-sampled k-space data. However, the development of deep learning methods requires large training datasets, which have not been publicly available for CMR. To address this gap, we released a dataset that includes multi-contrast, multi-view, multi-slice and multi-coil CMR imaging data from 300 subjects. Imaging studies include cardiac cine and mapping sequences. Manual segmentations of the myocardium and chambers of all the subjects are also provided within the dataset. Scripts of state-of-the-art reconstruction algorithms were also provided as a point of reference. Our aim is to facilitate the advancement of state-of-the-art CMR image reconstruction by introducing standardized evaluation criteria and making the dataset freely accessible to the research community. Researchers can access the dataset at https://www.synapse.org/#!Synapse:syn51471091/wiki/.

A Reliable and Interpretable Framework of Multi-view Learning for Liver Fibrosis Staging

Staging of liver fibrosis is important in the diagnosis and treatment planning of patients suffering from liver diseases. Current deep learning-based methods using abdominal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) usually take a sub-region of the liver as an input, which nevertheless could miss critical information. To explore richer representations, we formulate this task as a multi-view learning problem and employ multiple sub-regions of the liver. Previously, features or predictions are usually combined in an implicit manner, and uncertainty-aware methods have been proposed. However, these methods could be challenged to capture cross-view representations, which can be important in the accurate prediction of staging. Therefore, we propose a reliable multi-view learning method with interpretable combination rules, which can model global representations to improve the accuracy of predictions. Specifically, the proposed method estimates uncertainties based on subjective logic to improve reliability, and an explicit combination rule is applied based on Dempster-Shafer's evidence theory with good power of interpretability. Moreover, a data-efficient transformer is introduced to capture representations in the global view. Results evaluated on enhanced MRI data show that our method delivers superior performance over existing multi-view learning methods.

BayeSeg: Bayesian Modeling for Medical Image Segmentation with Interpretable Generalizability

Due to the cross-domain distribution shift aroused from diverse medical imaging systems, many deep learning segmentation methods fail to perform well on unseen data, which limits their real-world applicability. Recent works have shown the benefits of extracting domain-invariant representations on domain generalization. However, the interpretability of domain-invariant features remains a great challenge. To address this problem, we propose an interpretable Bayesian framework (BayeSeg) through Bayesian modeling of image and label statistics to enhance model generalizability for medical image segmentation. Specifically, we first decompose an image into a spatial-correlated variable and a spatial-variant variable, assigning hierarchical Bayesian priors to explicitly force them to model the domain-stable shape and domain-specific appearance information respectively. Then, we model the segmentation as a locally smooth variable only related to the shape. Finally, we develop a variational Bayesian framework to infer the posterior distributions of these explainable variables. The framework is implemented with neural networks, and thus is referred to as deep Bayesian segmentation. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results on prostate segmentation and cardiac segmentation tasks have shown the effectiveness of our proposed method. Moreover, we investigated the interpretability of BayeSeg by explaining the posteriors and analyzed certain factors that affect the generalization ability through further ablation studies. Our code will be released via https://zmiclab.github.io/projects.html, once the manuscript is accepted for publication.