A Deep Learning-Based Framework for Highly Accelerated Prostate MR Dispersion Imaging

Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) measures microvascular perfusion by capturing the temporal changes of an MRI contrast agent in a target tissue, and it provides valuable information for the diagnosis and prognosis of a wide range of tumors. Quantitative DCE-MRI analysis commonly relies on the nonlinear least square (NLLS) fitting of a pharmacokinetic (PK) model to concentration curves. However, the voxel-wise application of such nonlinear curve fitting is highly time-consuming. The arterial input function (AIF) needs to be utilized in quantitative DCE-MRI analysis. and in practice, a population-based arterial AIF is often used in PK modeling. The contribution of intravascular dispersion to the measured signal enhancement is assumed to be negligible. The MR dispersion imaging (MRDI) model was recently proposed to account for intravascular dispersion, enabling more accurate PK modeling. However, the complexity of the MRDI hinders its practical usability and makes quantitative PK modeling even more time-consuming. In this paper, we propose fast MR dispersion imaging (fMRDI) to effectively represent the intravascular dispersion and highly accelerated PK parameter estimation. We also propose a deep learning-based, two-stage framework to accelerate PK parameter estimation. We used a deep neural network (NN) to estimate PK parameters directly from enhancement curves. The estimation from NN was further refined using several steps of NLLS, which is significantly faster than performing NLLS from random initializations. A data synthesis module is proposed to generate synthetic training data for the NN. Two data-processing modules were introduced to improve the model's stability against noise and variations. Experiments on our in-house clinical prostate MRI dataset demonstrated that our method significantly reduces the processing time, produces a better distinction between normal and clinically significant prostate cancer (csPCa) lesions, and is more robust against noise than conventional DCE-MRI analysis methods.