Paired conditional generative adversarial network for highly accelerated liver 4D MRI.

Purpose. 4D MRI with high spatiotemporal resolution is desired for image-guided liver radiotherapy. Acquiring densely sampling k-space data is time-consuming. Accelerated acquisition with sparse samples is desirable but often causes degraded image quality or long reconstruction time. We propose the Reconstruct Paired Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (Re-Con-GAN) to shorten the 4D MRI reconstruction time while maintaining the reconstruction quality. Methods. Patients who underwent free-breathing liver 4D MRI were included in the study. Fully- and retrospectively under-sampled data at 3, 6 and 10 times (3×, 6× and 10×) were first reconstructed using the nuFFT algorithm. Re-Con-GAN then trained input and output in pairs. Three types of networks, ResNet9, UNet and reconstruction swin transformer (RST), were explored as generators. PatchGAN was selected as the discriminator. Re-Con-GAN processed the data (3D + t ) as temporal slices (2D + t ). A total of 48 patients with 12 332 temporal slices were split into training (37 patients with 10 721 slices) and test (11 patients with 1611 slices). Compressed sensing (CS) reconstruction with spatiotemporal sparsity constraint was used as a benchmark. Reconstructed image quality was further evaluated with a liver gross tumor volume (GTV) localization task using Mask-RCNN trained from a separate 3D static liver MRI dataset (70 patients; 103 GTV contours). Results. Re-Con-GAN consistently achieved comparable/better PSNR, SSIM, and RMSE scores compared to CS/UNet models. The inference time of Re-Con-GAN, UNet and CS are 0.15, 0.16, and 120 s. The GTV detection task showed that Re-Con-GAN and CS, compared to UNet, better improved the dice score (3× Re-Con-GAN 80.98%; 3× CS 80.74%; 3× UNet 79.88%) of unprocessed under-sampled images (3× 69.61%). Conclusion. A generative network with adversarial training is proposed with promising and efficient reconstruction results demonstrated on an in-house dataset. The rapid and qualitative reconstruction of 4D liver MR has the potential to facilitate online adaptive MR-guided radiotherapy for liver cancer.