Multi-Modality MR Image Synthesis via Confidence-Guided Aggregation and Cross-Modality Refinement.

Abstract

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can provide multi-modality MR images by setting task-specific scan parameters, and has been widely used in various disease diagnosis and planned treatments. However, in practical clinical applications, it is often difficult to obtain multi-modality MR images simultaneously due to patient discomfort, and scanning costs, etc. Therefore, how to effectively utilize the existing modality images to synthesize missing modality image has become a hot research topic. In this paper, we propose a novel confidence-guided aggregation and cross-modality refinement network (CACR-Net) for multi-modality MR image synthesis, which effectively utilizes complementary and correlative information of multiple modalities to synthesize high-quality target-modality images. Specifically, to effectively utilize the complementary modality-specific characteristics, a confidence-guided aggregation module is proposed to adaptively aggregate the multiple target-modality images generated from multiple source-modality images by using the corresponding confidence maps. Based on the aggregated target-modality image, a cross-modality refinement module is presented to further refine the target-modality image by mining correlative information among the multiple source-modality images and aggregated target-modality image. By training the proposed CACR-Net in an end-to-end manner, high-quality and sharp target-modality MR images are effectively synthesized. Experimental results on the widely used benchmark demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.