GANcMRI: Cardiac magnetic resonance video generation and physiologic guidance using latent space prompting

Proc Mach Learn Res. 2023 Dec:225:594-606.

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence can be applied to medical imaging on tasks such as privacy-preserving image generation and superresolution and denoising of existing images. Few prior approaches have used cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (cMRI) as a modality given the complexity of videos (the addition of the temporal dimension) as well as the limited scale of publicly available datasets. We introduce GANcMRI, a generative adversarial network that can synthesize cMRI videos with physiological guidance based on latent space prompting. GANcMRI uses a StyleGAN framework to learn the latent space from individual video frames and leverages the timedependent trajectory between end-systolic and end-diastolic frames in the latent space to predict progression and generate motion over time. We proposed various methods for modeling latent time-dependent trajectories and found that our Frame-to-frame approach generates the best motion and video quality. GANcMRI generated high-quality cMRI image frames that are indistinguishable by cardiologists, however, artifacts in video generation allow cardiologists to still recognize the difference between real and generated videos. The generated cMRI videos can be prompted to apply physiologybased adjustments which produces clinically relevant phenotypes recognizable by cardiologists. GANcMRI has many potential applications such as data augmentation, education, anomaly detection, and preoperative planning.

Keywords: Generative AI; StyleGAN; cardiac magnetic resonance imaging; physiologic guidance; video generation.