Reconstruction of spectra from truncated free induction decays by deep learning in proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

Abstract

To explore the applicability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in the reconstruction of spectra from truncated FIDs (tFIDs) in 1 H-MRS, which can be valuable in situations in which data sampling is highly limited, such as spectroscopic magnetic resonance fingerprinting. Rat brain FIDs were simulated at 9.4 T based on in vivo data (N = 11) and randomly truncated by retaining 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, and 1024 (null truncation) points (denoted as tFID8 , tFID16 , … tFID1024 ). Using a U-net, 3 CNNs were individually trained (N = 40 000) in time domain only (FID to FID [FID CNNFID ]), in frequency domain only (spectrum to spectrum [spec CNNspec ]), and across the domains (FID to spectrum [FID CNNspec ]) to map the truncated data to their fully sampled versions. The CNNs were tested on the simulated data (N = 5000), and the CNN with the best performance was further tested on the in vivo data, for which the CNN-predicted fully sampled data were analyzed using the LCModel and the results were compared with those from the original, fully sampled data. The best result on the simulated data was obtained with spec CNNspec , which effectively recovered the spectral details even for those input spectra that appear as a hump due to substantial FID truncation (spectra from tFID16 and tFID32 ). Overall, its performance was significantly degraded on the in vivo data. Nonetheless, using spec CNNspec , several coupled spins in addition to the major singlets can be quantified from tFID128 with the error no larger than 10%. Upon the availability of more realistically simulated training data, CNNs can also be used in the reconstruction of spectra from truncated FIDs.