Distortion-corrected image reconstruction with deep learning on an MRI-Linac

MRI is increasingly utilized for image-guided radiotherapy due to its outstanding soft-tissue contrast and lack of ionizing radiation. However, geometric distortions caused by gradient nonlinearities (GNLs) limit anatomical accuracy, potentially compromising the quality of tumor treatments. In addition, slow MR acquisition and reconstruction limit the potential for effective image guidance. Here, we demonstrate a deep learning-based method that rapidly reconstructs distortion-corrected images from raw k-space data for MR-guided radiotherapy applications.

We leverage recent advances in interpretable unrolling networks to develop a Distortion-Corrected Reconstruction Network (DCReconNet) that applies convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to learn effective regularizations and nonuniform fast Fourier transforms for GNL-encoding. DCReconNet was trained on a public MR brain dataset from 11 healthy volunteers for fully sampled and accelerated techniques, including parallel imaging (PI) and compressed sensing (CS). The performance of DCReconNet was tested on phantom, brain, pelvis, and lung images acquired on a 1.0T MRI-Linac. The DCReconNet, CS-, PI-and UNet-based reconstructed image quality was measured by structural similarity (SSIM) and RMS error (RMSE) for numerical comparisons. The computation time and residual distortion for each method were also reported.

Imaging results demonstrated that DCReconNet better preserves image structures compared to CS- and PI-based reconstruction methods. DCReconNet resulted in the highest SSIM (0.95 median value) and lowest RMSE (<0.04) on simulated brain images with four times acceleration. DCReconNet is over 10-times faster than iterative, regularized reconstruction methods.

DCReconNet provides fast and geometrically accurate image reconstruction and has the potential for MRI-guided radiotherapy applications.