Motion Artifact Reduction Using U-Net Model with Three-Dimensional Simulation-Based Datasets for Brain Magnetic Resonance Images

This study aimed to remove motion artifacts from brain magnetic resonance (MR) images using a U-Net model. In addition, a simulation method was proposed to increase the size of the dataset required to train the U-Net model while avoiding the overfitting problem. The volume data were rotated and translated with random intensity and frequency, in three dimensions, and were iterated as the number of slices in the volume data. Then, for every slice, a portion of the motion-free k-space data was replaced with motion k-space data, respectively. In addition, based on the transposed k-space data, we acquired MR images with motion artifacts and residual maps and constructed datasets. For a quantitative evaluation, the root mean square error (RMSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), coefficient of correlation (CC), and universal image quality index (UQI) were measured. The U-Net models for motion artifact reduction with the residual map-based dataset showed the best performance across all evaluation factors. In particular, the RMSE, PSNR, CC, and UQI improved by approximately 5.35×, 1.51×, 1.12×, and 1.01×, respectively, and the U-Net model with the residual map-based dataset was compared with the direct images. In conclusion, our simulation-based dataset demonstrates that U-Net models can be effectively trained for motion artifact reduction.