Deep learning magnetic resonance spectroscopy fingerprints of brain tumours using quantum mechanically synthesised data

Abstract

Metabolic fingerprints are valuable biomarkers for diseases that are associated with metabolic disorders. 1H magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) is a unique noninvasive diagnostic tool that can depict the metabolic fingerprint based solely on the proton signal of different molecules present in the tissue. However, its performance is severely hindered by low SNR, field inhomogeneities and overlapping spectra of metabolites, which affect the quantification of metabolites. Consequently, MRS is rarely included in routine clinical protocols and has not been proven in multi-institutional trials. This work proposes an alternative approach, where instead of quantifying metabolites' concentration, deep learning (DL) is used to model the complex nonlinear relationship between diseases and their spectroscopic metabolic fingerprint (pattern). DL requires large training datasets, acquired (ideally) with the same protocol/scanner, which are very rarely available. To overcome this limitation, a novel method is proposed that can quantum mechanically synthesise MRS data for any scanner/acquisition protocol. The proposed methodology is applied to the challenging clinical problem of differentiating metastasis from glioblastoma brain tumours on data acquired across multiple institutions. DL algorithms were trained on the augmented synthetic spectra and tested on two independent datasets acquired by different scanners, achieving a receiver operating characteristic area under the curve of up to 0.96 and 0.97, respectively.