Aleatoric-Uncertainty-Aware Maximum Intensity Projection-Based GAN for 7T-Like Generation From 3T TOF-MRA

Time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography (TOF-MRA) is a prevalent vascular imaging technique for assessing cerebrovascular diseases. Compared to routine 3T TOF-MRA, 7T TOF-MRA provides vascular structures with a higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and better vessel contrast, revealing greater vascular details. However, the inaccessibility of 7T scanners and specific physiological and technical concerns limit its clinical application. Therefore, we aimed to generate high-quality 7T-like TOF-MRA from 3T TOF-MRA. Considering the spatial sparsity of vessel signals, the visibility discrepancy of distal and small vessels between 3T and 7T images, and the subtle spatial misalignment between paired data, we proposed a novel aleatoric-uncertainty-aware maximum intensity projection-based generative adversarial network (AU-MIPGAN). In our method, we employed a knowledge distillation (KD) framework to incorporate multi-directional MIP information into the 3T-to-7T learning process to strengthen the learning of vessels and provide three-dimensional (3D) vascular morphological knowledge for the student model, facilitating accurate generation of vascular structures. Furthermore, we exploited AU modeling to compensate for the spatial misalignment between paired 3T and 7T images during the training procedure, which helped the model concentrate more on learning the intrinsic gap between 3T and 7T images. Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrated that the proposed AU-MIPGAN can achieve promising performance for 7T-like TOF-MRA generation.