Brain MRI artefact detection and correction using convolutional neural networks

Brain MRI is one of the most commonly used diagnostic imaging tools to detect neurodegenerative disease. Diagnostic image quality is a key factor to enable robust image analysis algorithms developed for downstream tasks such as segmentation. In clinical practice, one of the main challenges is the presence of image artefacts, which can lead to low diagnostic image quality.

In this paper, we propose using dense convolutional neural networks to detect and a residual U-net architecture to correct motion related brain MRI artefacts. We first generate synthetic artefacts using an MR physics based corruption strategy. Then, we use a detection strategy based on dense convolutional neural network to detect artefacts. The detected artefacts are corrected using a residual U-net network trained on corrupted data.

Our pipeline for detection and correction of artefacts is capable of reaching not only better quality image quality, but also better segmentation accuracy of stroke segmentation. The algorithm is validated using 28 cases brain MRI stroke segmentation dataset and showed an accuracy of 97.8% for detecting artefacts in our experiments. We also illustrated the improved image quality and segmentation accuracy with the proposed correction algorithm.

Ensuring high image quality and high segmentation quality jointly can improve the automatic image analysis pipelines and reduce the influence of low image quality on final prognosis. With this work, we illustrate a performance analysis on brain MRI stroke segmentation.