VORTEX: Physics-Driven Data Augmentations Using Consistency Training for Robust Accelerated MRI Reconstruction

Arjun D Desai, Beliz Gunel, Batu Ozturkler, Harris Beg, Shreyas Vasanawala, Brian Hargreaves, Christopher Re, John M. Pauly, Akshay Chaudhari

Keywords: medical imaging, MRI, radiology, image reconstruction, inverse problems, distribution shift, robustness

TL;DR: This work introduces physics-based augmentations for semi-supervised, consistency-based training to improve MRI reconstruction in data-limited and out-of-distribution settings.

Abstract: Deep neural networks have enabled improved image quality and fast inference times for various inverse problems, including accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction. However, such models require extensive fully-sampled ground truth datasets, which are difficult to curate and are sensitive to distribution drifts. In this work, we propose applying physics-driven data augmentations for consistency training that leverage our domain knowledge of the forward MRI data acquisition process and MRI physics to achieve improved label efficiency and robustness to clinically-relevant distribution drifts. Our approach, termed VORTEX, (1) demonstrates strong improvements over supervised baselines with and without data augmentation in robustness to signal-to-noise ratio change and motion corruption in data-limited regimes; (2) considerably outperforms state-of-the-art purely image-based data augmentation techniques and self-supervised reconstruction methods on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution data; and (3) enables composing heterogeneous image-based and physics-driven data augmentations.

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Paper Type: methodological development

Primary Subject Area: Image Acquisition and Reconstruction

Secondary Subject Area: Learning with Noisy Labels and Limited Data

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Code And Data: https://github.com/ad12/meddlr

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2111.02549/code)