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1. MRI-MECH: mechanics-informed MRI to estimate esophageal health

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2023.1195067  

   Halder, Sourav; Johnson, Ethan M.; Yamasaki, Jun; Kahrilas, Peter J.; Markl, Michael; Pandolfino, John E.; Patankar, Neelesh A. (June 2023, Frontiers in Physiology)

   Dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a popular medical imaging technique that generates image sequences of the flow of a contrast material inside tissues and organs. However, its application to imaging bolus movement through the esophagus has only been demonstrated in few feasibility studies and is relatively unexplored. In this work, we present a computational framework called mechanics-informed MRI (MRI-MECH) that enhances that capability, thereby increasing the applicability of dynamic MRI for diagnosing esophageal disorders. Pineapple juice was used as the swallowed contrast material for the dynamic MRI, and the MRI image sequence was used as input to the MRI-MECH. The MRI-MECH modeled the esophagus as a flexible one-dimensional tube, and the elastic tube walls followed a linear tube law. Flow through the esophagus was governed by one-dimensional mass and momentum conservation equations. These equations were solved using a physics-informed neural network. The physics-informed neural network minimized the difference between the measurements from the MRI and model predictions and ensured that the physics of the fluid flow problem was always followed. MRI-MECH calculated the fluid velocity and pressure during esophageal transit and estimated the mechanical health of the esophagus by calculating wall stiffness and active relaxation. Additionally, MRI-MECH predicted missing information about the lower esophageal sphincter during the emptying process, demonstrating its applicability to scenarios with missing data or poor image resolution. In addition to potentially improving clinical decisions based on quantitative estimates of the mechanical health of the esophagus, MRI-MECH can also be adapted for application to other medical imaging modalities to enhance their functionality. 

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2. Refacing Defaced MRI with PixelCNN

   https://doi.org/10.1109/IJCNN55064.2022.9891937  

   Xiao, Yaorong; Ashbee, William; Calhoun, Vince D; Plis, Sergey (July 2022, IEEE)
3. BNU-Net: A Novel Deep Learning Approach for LV MRI Analysis in Short-Axis MRI

   https://doi.org/10.1109/BIBE.2019.00137  

   Chu, Wenhui; Molina, Giovanni; Navkar, Nikhil V.; Eick, Christoph F.; Becker, Aaron T.; Tsiamyrtzis, Panagiotis; Tsekos, Nikolaos V. (October 2019, 2019 IEEE 19th International Conference on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering (BIBE))

   This work presents a novel deep learning architecture called BNU-Net for the purpose of cardiac segmentation based on short-axis MRI images. Its name is derived from the Batch Normalized (BN) U-Net architecture for medical image segmentation. New generations of deep neural networks (NN) are called convolutional NN (CNN). CNNs like U-Net have been widely used for image classification tasks. CNNs are supervised training models which are trained to learn hierarchies of features automatically and robustly perform classification. Our architecture consists of an encoding path for feature extraction and a decoding path that enables precise localization. We compare this approach with a parallel approach named U-Net. Both BNU-Net and U-Net are cardiac segmentation approaches: while BNU-Net employs batch normalization to the results of each convolutional layer and applies an exponential linear unit (ELU) approach that operates as activation function, U-Net does not apply batch normalization and is based on Rectified Linear Units (ReLU). The presented work (i) facilitates various image preprocessing techniques, which includes affine transformations and elastic deformations, and (ii) segments the preprocessed images using the new deep learning architecture. We evaluate our approach on a dataset containing 805 MRI images from 45 patients. The experimental results reveal that our approach accomplishes comparable or better performance than other state-of-the-art approaches in terms of the Dice coefficient and the average perpendicular distance. 

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4. BNU- Net: a Novel Deep Learning Approach for LV MRI Analysis in Short-Axis MRI

   Chu, Wenhui; Molina, Giovanni; Navkar, Nikhil; Eick, Christoph; Becker, Aaron; Tsekos, Nikolaos (October 2019, IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering (BIBE))

   This work presents a novel deep learning architecture called BNU-Net for the purpose of cardiac segmentation based on short-axis MRI images. Its name is derived from the Batch Normalized (BN) U-Net architecture for medical image segmentation. New generations of deep neural networks (NN) are called convolutional NN (CNN). CNNs like U-Net have been widely used for image classification tasks. CNNs are supervised training models which are trained to learn hierarchies of features automatically and robustly perform classification. Our architecture consists of an encoding path for feature extraction and a decoding path that enables precise localization. We compare this approach with a parallel approach named U-Net. Both BNU-Net and U-Net are cardiac segmentation approaches: while BNU-Net employs batch normalization to the results of each convolutional layer and applies an exponential linear unit (ELU) approach that operates as activation function, U-Net does not apply batch normalization and is based on Rectified Linear Units (ReLU). The presented work (i) facilitates various image preprocessing techniques, which includes affine transformations and elastic deformations, and (ii) segments the preprocessed images using the new deep learning architecture. We evaluate our approach on a dataset containing 805 MRI images from 45 patients. The experimental results reveal that our approach accomplishes comparable or better performance than other state-of-the-art approaches in terms of the Dice coefficient and the average perpendicular distance. Index Terms—Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Batch Normalization; Exponential Linear Units 

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5. Supervised Registration of Late Gadolinium Enhanced Cardiac MRI and Cine Cardiac MRI using Convolutional Neural Networks

   Upendra, Roshan R.; Simon, Richard; Linte, Cristian A. (July 2020, Springer Comm Computer Inform Sci.)