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NC-PDNet: a Density-Compensated Unrolled Network for 2D and 3D non-Cartesian MRI Reconstruction

Posted on by Jean-Luc Starck

Deep Learning has become a very promising avenue for magnetic resonance image (MRI) reconstruction. In this work, we explore the potential of unrolled networks for the non-Cartesian acquisition setting. We design the NC-PDNet, the first density-compensated unrolled network and validate the need for its key components via an ablation study. Moreover, we conduct some generalizability experiments to test our network in out-of-distribution settings, for example training on knee data and validating on brain data. The results show that the NC-PDNet outperforms the baseline models visually and quantitatively in the 2D settings. Additionally, in the 3D settings, it outperforms them visually. In particular, in the 2D multi-coil acquisition scenario, the NC-PDNet provides up to a 1.2 dB improvement in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) over baseline networks, while also allowing a gain of at least 1 dB in PSNR in generalization settings. We provide the opensource implementation of our network, and in particular the Non-uniform Fourier Transform in TensorFlow, tested on 2D multi-coil and 3D data.

Reference: Z. Ramzi,  Chaithya G.R.,  J.-L. Starck and P. Ciuciu “NC-PDNet: a Density-Compensated Unrolled Network for 2D and 3D non-Cartesian MRI Reconstruction”.

This conference paper presents an adaptation of unrolled networks to the challenging setup of Non-Cartesian MRI Reconstruction. It also introduces the implementation of the Non-Uniform Fast Fourier Transform in TensorFlow: tfkbnufft.
It has been accepted at ISBI 2021.

Density Compensated Unrolled Networks for Non-Cartesian MRI Reconstruction

Posted on by Jean-Luc Starck

Deep neural networks have recently been thoroughly investigated as a powerful tool for MRI reconstruction. There is a lack of research, however, regarding their use for a specific setting of MRI, namely non-Cartesian acquisitions. In this work, we introduce a novel kind of deep neural networks to tackle this problem, namely density compensated unrolled neural networks, which rely on Density Compensation to correct the uneven weighting of the k-space. We assess their efficiency on the publicly available fastMRI dataset, and perform a small ablation study. Our results show that the density-compensated unrolled neural networks outperform the different baselines, and that all parts of the design are needed. We also open source our code, in particular a Non-Uniform Fast Fourier transform for TensorFlow.

Reference: Z. Ramzi,  J.-L. Starck and P. Ciuciu “Density Compensated Unrolled Networks for Non-Cartesian MRI Reconstruction”.

This conference paper presents an adaptation of unrolled networks to the challenging setup of Non-Cartesian MRI Reconstruction. It also introduces the implementation of the Non-Uniform Fast Fourier Transform in TensorFlow: tfkbnufft.
It has been accepted at ISBI 2021.

State-of-the-art Machine Learning MRI Reconstruction in 2020: Results of the Second fastMRI Challenge

State-of-the-art Machine Learning MRI Reconstruction in 2020: Results of the Second fastMRI Challenge

Posted on by Jean-Luc Starck

Accelerating MRI scans is one of the principal outstanding problems in the MRI research community. Towards this goal, we hosted the second fastMRI competition targeted towards reconstructing MR images with subsampled k-space data. We provided participants with data from 7,299 clinical brain scans (de-identified via a HIPAA-compliant procedure by NYU Langone Health), holding back the fully-sampled data from 894 of these scans for challenge evaluation purposes. In contrast to the 2019 challenge, we focused our radiologist evaluations on pathological assessment in brain images. We also debuted a new Transfer track that required participants to submit models evaluated on MRI scanners from outside the training set. We received 19 submissions from eight different groups. Results showed one team scoring best in both SSIM scores and qualitative radiologist evaluations. We also performed analysis on alternative metrics to mitigate the effects of background noise and collected feedback from the participants to inform future challenges. Lastly, we identify common failure modes across the submissions, highlighting areas of need for future research in the MRI reconstruction community.

Reference: Mathew J. Muckley, ...,   Z. Ramzi,  P. Ciuciu and J.-L. Starck et al . “State-of-the-art Machine Learning MRI Reconstruction in 2020: Results of the Second fastMRI Challenge”.

This paper presents the results of the fastMRI 2020 challenge, where our team finished 2nd in the 4x and 8x supervised tracks.
It is currently being submitted to IEEE TMI.

Faster and better sparse blind source separation through mini-batch optimization

Faster and better sparse blind source separation through mini-batch optimization

Posted on by Jean-Luc Starck

Sparse Blind Source Separation (sBSS) plays a key role in scientific domains as different as biomedical imaging, remote sensing or astrophysics, which require the development of increasingly faster and scalable BSS methods without sacrificing the separation performances. To that end, a new distributed sparse BSS algorithm is introduced based on a mini-batch ex-tension of the Generalized Morphological Component Analysis algorithm (GMCA). Precisely, it combines a robust projected alternate least-squares method with mini-batches optimization. The originality further lies in the use of a manifold-based aggregation of asynchronously estimated mixing ma- trices. Numerical experiments are carried out on realistic spectroscopic spectra, and highlight the ability of the proposed distributed GMCA (dGMCA) to provide very good separation results even when very small mini-batches are used. Quite unexpectedly, it can further outperform the (non-distributed) state-of-the-art methods for highly sparse sources.

Reference: Christophe Kervazo, Tobias Liaudat and Jérôme Bobin.
“Faster and better sparse blind source separation through mini-batch optimization”, Digital Signal Processing, Elsevier, 2020.

DSP Elsevier, HAL.

Multi-CCD Point Spread Function Modelling

Multi-CCD Point Spread Function Modelling

Posted on by Jean-Luc Starck

Context. Galaxy imaging surveys observe a vast number of objects that are affected by the instrument’s Point Spread Function (PSF). Weak lensing missions, in particular, aim at measuring the shape of galaxies, and PSF effects represent an important source of systematic errors which must be handled appropriately. This demands a high accuracy in the modelling as well as the estimation of the PSF at galaxy positions.

Aims. Sometimes referred to as non-parametric PSF estimation, the goal of this paper is to estimate a PSF at galaxy positions, starting from a set of noisy star image observations distributed over the focal plane. To accomplish this, we need our model to first of all, precisely capture the PSF field variations over the Field of View (FoV), and then to recover the PSF at the selected positions. Methods. This paper proposes a new method, coined MCCD (Multi-CCD PSF modelling), that creates, simultaneously, a PSF field model over all of the instrument’s focal plane. This allows to capture global as well as local PSF features through the use of two complementary models which enforce different spatial constraints. Most existing non-parametric models build one model per Charge-Coupled Device (CCD), which can lead to difficulties in capturing global ellipticity patterns.

Results. We first test our method on a realistic simulated dataset comparing it with two state-of-the-art PSF modelling methods (PSFEx and RCA). We outperform both of them with our proposed method. Then we contrast our approach with PSFEx on real data from CFIS (Canada-France Imaging Survey) that uses the CFHT (Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope). We show that our PSF model is less noisy and achieves a ~ 22% gain on pixel Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) with respect to PSFEx.

Conclusions. We present, and share the code of, a new PSF modelling algorithm that models the PSF field on all the focal plane that is mature enough to handle real data.

Reference: Tobias Liaudat, Jérôme Bonnin,  Jean-Luc Starck, Morgan A. Schmitz, Axel Guinot, Martin Kilbinger and Stephen D. J. Gwyn. “Multi-CCD Point Spread Function Modelling”, submitted 2020.

arXiv, code.

Probabilistic Mapping of Dark Matter by Neural Score Matching

Probabilistic Mapping of Dark Matter by Neural Score Matching

Posted on by Benjamin Remy


The Dark Matter present in the Large-Scale Structure of the Universe is invisible, but its presence can be inferred through the small gravitational lensing effect it has on the images of far away galaxies. By measuring this lensing effect on a large number of galaxies it is possible to reconstruct maps of the Dark Matter distribution on the sky. This, however, represents an extremely challenging inverse problem due to missing data and noise dominated measurements. In this work, we present a novel methodology for addressing such inverse problems by combining elements of Bayesian statistics, analytic physical theory, and a recent class of Deep Generative Models based on Neural Score Matching. This approach allows to do the following: (1) make full use of analytic cosmological theory to constrain the 2pt statistics of the solution, (2) learn from cosmological simulations any differences between this analytic prior and full simulations, and (3) obtain samples from the full Bayesian posterior of the problem for robust Uncertainty Quantification. We present an application of this methodology on the first deep-learning-assisted Dark Matter map reconstruction of the Hubble Space Telescope COSMOS field.

Reference: Benjamin Remy, François Lanusse, Zaccharie Ramzi, Jia Liu, Niall Jeffrey and Jean-Luc Starck. “Probabilistic Mapping of Dark Matter by Neural Score Matching”, Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences Workshop, NeurIPS 2020.

arXiv, code.

XPDNet for MRI Reconstruction: an Application to the fastMRI 2020 Brain Challenge

XPDNet for MRI Reconstruction: an Application to the fastMRI 2020 Brain Challenge

Posted on by Jean-Luc Starck

We present a modular cross-domain neural network the XPDNet and its application to the MRI reconstruction task. This approach consists in unrolling the PDHG algorithm as well as learning the acceleration scheme between steps. We also adopt state-of-the-art techniques specific to Deep Learning for MRI reconstruction. At the time of writing, this approach is the best performer in PSNR on the fastMRI leaderboards for both knee and brain at acceleration factor 4.

Reference:  Z. Ramzi,  P. Ciuciu and J.-L. Starck . “XPDNet for MRI Reconstruction: an Application to the fastMRI 2020 Brain Challenge”.

 

This network was used to submit reconstructions to the 2020 fastMRI Brain reconstruction challenge. Results are to be announced on December 6th 2020.

Denoising Score-Matching for Uncertainty Quantification in Inverse Problems

Denoising Score-Matching for Uncertainty Quantification in Inverse Problems

Posted on by Jean-Luc Starck

Deep neural networks have proven extremely efficient at solving a wide range of inverse problems, but most often the uncertainty on the solution they provide is hard to quantify. In this work, we propose a generic Bayesian framework for solving inverse problems, in which we limit the use of deep neural networks to learning a prior distribution on the signals to recover. We adopt recent denoising score matching techniques to learn this prior from data, and subsequently use it as part of an annealed Hamiltonian Monte-Carlo scheme to sample the full posterior of image inverse problems. We apply this framework to Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) reconstruction and illustrate how this approach not only yields high quality reconstructions but can also be used to assess the uncertainty on particular features of a reconstructed image.

Reference:  Z. Ramzi,  Benjamin Remy, François Lanusse, J.-L. Starck and P. Ciuciu. “Denoising Score-Matching for Uncertainty Quantification in Inverse Problems”, Deep Learning and Inverse Problems Workshop NeurIPS, 2020.

PySAP: Python Sparse Data Analysis Package for Multidisciplinary Image Processing

PySAP: Python Sparse Data Analysis Package for Multidisciplinary Image Processing

Posted on by Samuel Farrens

 

Authors: S. Farrens, A. Grigis, L. El Gueddari, Z. Ramzi, Chaithya G. R., S. Starck, B. Sarthou, H. Cherkaoui, P.Ciuciu, J-L. Starck
Journal: Astronomy and Computing
Year: 2020
DOI: 10.1016/j.ascom.2020.100402
Download: ADS | arXiv

Abstract

We present the open-source image processing software package PySAP (Python Sparse data Analysis Package) developed for the COmpressed Sensing for Magnetic resonance Imaging and Cosmology (COSMIC) project. This package provides a set of flexible tools that can be applied to a variety of compressed sensing and image reconstruction problems in various research domains. In particular, PySAP offers fast wavelet transforms and a range of integrated optimisation algorithms. In this paper we present the features available in PySAP and provide practical demonstrations on astrophysical and magnetic resonance imaging data.

Code

PySAP Code