Prototype of a Cardiac MRI Simulator for the Training of Supervised Neural Networks

Supervised deep learning methods typically rely on large datasets for training. Ethical and practical considerations usually make it difficult to access large amounts of healthcare data, such as medical images, with known task-specific ground truth. This hampers the development of adequate, unbiased and robust deep learning methods for clinical tasks. Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) are the result of several complex physical and engineering processes and the generation of synthetic MR images provides a formidable challenge. Here, we present the first results of ongoing work to create a generator for large synthetic cardiac MR image datasets. As an application for the simulator, we show how the synthetic images can be used to help train a supervised neural network that estimates the volume of the left ventricular myocardium directly from cardiac MR images. Despite its current limitations, our generator may in the future help address the current shortage of labelled cardiac MRI needed for the development of supervised deep learning tools. It is likely to also find applications in the development of image reconstruction methods and tools to improve robustness, verification and interpretability of deep networks in this setting.