Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA.
Department of Mathematics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA.
Sci Rep. 2024 Jan 2;14(1):171. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-50566-7.
Image imputation refers to the task of generating a type of medical image given images of another type. This task becomes challenging when the difference between the available images, and the image to be imputed is large. In this manuscript, one such application is considered. It is derived from the dynamic contrast enhanced computed tomography (CECT) imaging of the kidneys: given an incomplete sequence of three CECT images, we are required to impute the missing image. This task is posed as one of probabilistic inference and a generative algorithm to generate samples of the imputed image, conditioned on the available images, is developed, trained, and tested. The output of this algorithm is the "best guess" of the imputed image, and a pixel-wise image of variance in the imputation. It is demonstrated that this best guess is more accurate than those generated by other, deterministic deep-learning based algorithms, including ones which utilize additional information and more complex loss terms. It is also shown that the pixel-wise variance image, which quantifies the confidence in the reconstruction, can be used to determine whether the result of the imputation meets a specified accuracy threshold and is therefore appropriate for a downstream task.
图像插补是指在给定另一类型图像的情况下生成某种类型医学图像的任务。当可用图像与要插补的图像之间存在较大差异时,这项任务就会变得极具挑战性。本文考虑了这样一个应用场景:它源自肾脏的动态对比增强计算机断层扫描(CECT)成像:给定一组不完整的三个 CECT 图像,我们需要对缺失的图像进行插补。这项任务被表述为概率推理问题之一,并开发、训练和测试了一种生成插补图像样本的生成算法。该算法的输出是插补图像的“最佳猜测”,以及插补过程中像素级方差的图像。结果表明,与其他基于确定性深度学习的算法(包括利用额外信息和更复杂的损失项的算法)生成的猜测相比,这种最佳猜测更为准确。还表明,量化重建置信度的像素级方差图像可用于确定插补结果是否达到指定的精度阈值,从而适用于下游任务。