Predicting 4D liver MRI for MR-guided interventions

Organ motion poses an unresolved challenge in image-guided interventions like radiation therapy, biopsies or tumor ablation. In the pursuit of solving this problem, the research field of time-resolved volumetric magnetic resonance imaging (4D MRI) has evolved. However, current techniques are unsuitable for most interventional settings because they lack sufficient temporal and/or spatial resolution or have long acquisition times. In this work, we propose a novel approach for real-time, high-resolution 4D MRI with large fields of view for MR-guided interventions. To this end, we propose a network-agnostic, end-to-end trainable, deep learning formulation that enables the prediction of a 4D liver MRI with respiratory states from a live 2D navigator MRI. Our method can be used in two ways: First, it can reconstruct high quality fast (near real-time) 4D MRI with high resolution (209×128×128 matrix size with isotropic 1.8mm voxel size and 0.6s/volume) given a dynamic interventional 2D navigator slice for guidance during an intervention. Second, it can be used for retrospective 4D reconstruction with a temporal resolution of below 0.2s/volume for motion analysis and use in radiation therapy. We report a mean target registration error (TRE) of 1.19±0.74mm, which is below voxel size. We compare our results with a state-of-the-art retrospective 4D MRI reconstruction. Visual evaluation shows comparable quality. We compare different network architectures within our formulation. We show that small training sizes with short acquisition times down to 2 min can already achieve promising results and 24 min are sufficient for high quality results. Because our method can be readily combined with earlier time reducing methods, acquisition time can be further decreased while also limiting quality loss. We show that an end-to-end, deep learning formulation is highly promising for 4D MRI reconstruction.