Field Strength Agnostic Cardiac MR Image Segmentation

Seb Harrevelt, Yasmina Al Khalil, Sina Amirrajab, Josien P.W. Pluim, Marcel Breeuwer, Alexander Raaijmakers

Keywords: 7T Cardiac MRI, segmentation, synthesis, style transfer, bias field simulation

TL;DR: By using cardiac images at 3T to create synthetic images at 7T, we are able to more accurately segment 7T cardiac image

Abstract:

To train a field strength agnostic cardiac segmentation network, we propose two novel augmentation techniques that allow us to transform 3T images to synthetic 7T images: by i) simulating $B_1$ distribution to approximate the 7T bias field and ii) style transfer using
an unpaired 3T-to-7T GAN model. Data augmentation with these two methods improved the average Dice score over all classes by 22% and 25% respectively, on our 7T test dataset. Furthermore, the average performance on a 1.5T and 3T dataset were maintained.

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Paper Type: novel methodological ideas without extensive validation

Primary Subject Area: Segmentation

Secondary Subject Area: Image Synthesis

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