DCRA-Net: Attention-Enabled Reconstruction Model for Dynamic Fetal Cardiac MRI

TL;DR

DCRA-Net is a deep learning model that employs attention mechanisms and frequency domain analysis to accurately reconstruct dynamic fetal and adult cardiac MRI from highly undersampled data, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

This work introduces DCRA-Net, a novel attention-enabled deep learning model that improves reconstruction quality of fetal cardiac MRI from accelerated scans, addressing fetal motion and high heart rate challenges.

Findings

DCRA-Net outperforms L+S and k-GIN in PSNR for fetal and adult data.

High fidelity recovery of spatial details and temporal dynamics.

Effective in both regular and weighted undersampling scenarios.

Abstract

Dynamic fetal heart magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) presents unique challenges due to the fast heart rate of the fetus compared to adult subjects and uncontrolled fetal motion. This requires high temporal and spatial resolutions over a large field of view, in order to encompass surrounding maternal anatomy. In this work, we introduce Dynamic Cardiac Reconstruction Attention Network (DCRA-Net) - a novel deep learning model that employs attention mechanisms in spatial and temporal domains and temporal frequency representation of data to reconstruct the dynamics of the fetal heart from highly accelerated free-running (non-gated) MRI acquisitions. DCRA-Net was trained on retrospectively undersampled complex-valued cardiac MRIs from 42 fetal subjects and separately from 153 adult subjects, and evaluated on data from 14 fetal and 39 adult subjects respectively. Its performance was compared to L+S and k-GIN methods in both fetal and adult cases for an undersampling factor of 8x. The proposed network performed better than the comparators for both fetal and adult data, for both regular lattice and centrally weighted random undersampling. Aliased signals due to the undersampling were comprehensively resolved, and both the spatial details of the heart and its temporal dynamics were recovered with high fidelity. The highest performance was achieved when using lattice undersampling, data consistency and temporal frequency representation, yielding PSNR of 38 for fetal and 35 for adult cases. Our method is publicly available at https://github.com/denproc/DCRA-Net.