Synthesis of diffusion-weighted MRI scalar maps from FLAIR volumes using generative adversarial networks

Karissa Chan; Pejman Jabehdar Maralani; Alan R Moody; April Khademi

doi:10.3389/fninf.2023.1197330

Synthesis of diffusion-weighted MRI scalar maps from FLAIR volumes using generative adversarial networks

Front Neuroinform. 2023 Aug 2:17:1197330. doi: 10.3389/fninf.2023.1197330. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Karissa Chan^{1

2}, Pejman Jabehdar Maralani³, Alan R Moody³, April Khademi^{1

2

4}

Affiliations

¹ Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering Department, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada.
² Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Technology (iBEST), Toronto, ON, Canada.
³ Department of Medical Imaging, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
⁴ Keenan Research Center, St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto, ON, Canada.

Abstract

Introduction: Acquisition and pre-processing pipelines for diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) volumes are resource- and time-consuming. Generating synthetic DWI scalar maps from commonly acquired brain MRI sequences such as fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) could be useful for supplementing datasets. In this work we design and compare GAN-based image translation models for generating DWI scalar maps from FLAIR MRI for the first time.

Methods: We evaluate a pix2pix model, two modified CycleGANs using paired and unpaired data, and a convolutional autoencoder in synthesizing DWI fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) from whole FLAIR volumes. In total, 420 FLAIR and DWI volumes (11,957 images) from multi-center dementia and vascular disease cohorts were used for training/testing. Generated images were evaluated using two groups of metrics: (1) human perception metrics including peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM), (2) structural metrics including a newly proposed histogram similarity (Hist-KL) metric and mean squared error (MSE).

Results: Pix2pix demonstrated the best performance both quantitatively and qualitatively with mean PSNR, SSIM, and MSE metrics of 23.41 dB, 0.8, 0.004, respectively for MD generation, and 24.05 dB, 0.78, 0.004, respectively for FA generation. The new histogram similarity metric demonstrated sensitivity to differences in fine details between generated and real images with mean pix2pix MD and FA Hist-KL metrics of 11.73 and 3.74, respectively. Detailed analysis of clinically relevant regions of white matter (WM) and gray matter (GM) in the pix2pix images also showed strong significant (p < 0.001) correlations between real and synthetic FA values in both tissue types (R = 0.714 for GM, R = 0.877 for WM).

Discussion/conclusion: Our results show that pix2pix's FA and MD models had significantly better structural similarity of tissue structures and fine details than other models, including WM tracts and CSF spaces, between real and generated images. Regional analysis of synthetic volumes showed that synthetic DWI images can not only be used to supplement clinical datasets, but demonstrates potential utility in bypassing or correcting registration in data pre-processing.

Keywords: CycleGAN; DWI; FLAIR; GANs; image synthesis; pix2pix; translation.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC); the Government of Ontario; and the Alzheimer’s Society Research Program.