3D isotropic high-resolution fetal brain MRI reconstruction from motion corrupted thick data based on physical-informed unsupervised learning
Jiangjie Wu , Lixuan Chen , Zhenghao Li , Xin Li , Taotao Sun , Lihui Wang , Rongpin Wang , Hongjiang Wei , Yuyao Zhang
IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
High-resolution (HR) 3D fetal brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) volume reconstruction from multiple motion-corrupted stacks of 2D thick slices is crucial for clinical diagnosis and quantitative analysis. Reliable sliceto-volume registration (SVR)-based motion correction and super-resolution reconstruction (SRR) methods are essential for high-quality isotropic volume reconstruction. Deep learning (DL) has demonstrated potential in enhancing motion correction and SRR when compared to conventional methods. However, current supervised DL methods for SVR and SRR require external large-scale training datasets, which are difficult to obtain in clinical fetal MRI settings. To address these issues, we propose an unsupervised iterative SVR-SRR framework for isotropic HR volume reconstruction without using external databases. Specifically, we formulate the SVR process as a function that maps a thick 2D input slice and a target 3D volume to a rigid transformation matrix, which aligns the slice to the underlying location in the target volume. The function is parameterized by a convolutional neural network, which is trained by minimizing the difference between the volume slicing at the predicted position and the input slice. For the SRR process, we utilize a decoding network possessing a deep image prior framework with a comprehensive image degradation model to generate the HR volume. The decoding network, utilizing a forward degradation model, offers a local consistency prior to guide the reconstruction of HR volumes from input slices of individual subjects. Comprehensive experiments conducted on large-magnitude motion-corrupted simulation data and clinical data demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed framework over state-of-theart fetal brain reconstruction frameworks.