@article {997, title = {Optimisation of quantitative brain diffusion-relaxation MRI acquisition protocols with physics-informed machine learning}, journal = {Medical Image Analysis}, volume = {94}, year = {2024}, pages = {103134}, abstract = {

Diffusion-relaxation MRI aims to extract quantitative measures that characterise microstructural tissue properties such as orientation, size, and shape, but long acquisition times are typically required. This work proposes a physics-informed learning framework to extract an optimal subset of diffusion-relaxation MRI measurements for enabling shorter acquisition times, predict non-measured signals, and estimate quantitative parameters. In vivo and synthetic brain 5D-Diffusion-T1-T2*-weighted MRI data obtained from five healthy subjects were used for training and validation, and from a sixth participant for testing. One fully data-driven and two physics-informed machine learning methods were implemented and compared to two manual selection procedures and Cram{\'e}r–Rao lower bound optimisation. The physics-informed approaches could identify measurement-subsets that yielded more consistently accurate parameter estimates in simulations than other approaches, with similar signal prediction error. Five-fold shorter protocols yielded error distributions of estimated quantitative parameters with very small effect sizes compared to estimates from the full protocol. Selected subsets commonly included a denser sampling of the shortest and longest inversion time, lowest echo time, and high b-value. The proposed framework combining machine learning and MRI physics offers a promising approach to develop shorter imaging protocols without compromising the quality of parameter estimates and signal predictions.

}, keywords = {Brain, Diffusion-relaxation, Quantitative MRI, machine learning}, issn = {1361-8415}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.media.2024.103134}, url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1361841524000598}, author = {{\'A}lvaro Planchuelo-G{\'o}mez and Maxime Descoteaux and Hugo Larochelle and Jana Hutter and Derek K. Jones and Chantal M.W. Tax} } @article {994, title = {Increased MRI-based Brain Age in chronic migraine patients}, journal = {The Journal of Headache and Pain}, volume = {24}, year = {2023}, pages = {133}, abstract = {

Neuroimaging has revealed that migraine is linked to alterations in both the structure and function of the brain. However, the relationship of these changes with aging has not been studied in detail. Here we employ the Brain Age framework to analyze migraine, by building a machine-learning model that predicts age from neuroimaging data. We hypothesize that migraine patients will exhibit an increased Brain Age Gap (the difference between the predicted age and the chronological age) compared to healthy participants.

}, keywords = {Biomarkers, Brain age, machine learning, migraine disorders, neuroimaging}, issn = {1129-2377}, doi = {10.1186/s10194-023-01670-6}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1186/s10194-023-01670-6}, author = {Navarro-Gonz{\'a}lez, Rafael and Garc{\'\i}a-Azor{\'\i}n, David and Guerrero-Peral, {\'A}ngel L. and {\'A}lvaro Planchuelo-G{\'o}mez and Aja-Fern{\'a}ndez, Santiago and de Luis-Garc{\'\i}a, Rodrigo} } @article {995, title = {Validation of deep learning techniques for quality augmentation in diffusion MRI for clinical studies}, journal = {NeuroImage: Clinical}, volume = {39}, year = {2023}, pages = {103483}, abstract = {

The objective of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of deep learning (DL) techniques in improving the quality of diffusion MRI (dMRI) data in clinical applications. The study aims to determine whether the use of artificial intelligence (AI) methods in medical images may result in the loss of critical clinical information and/or the appearance of false information. To assess this, the focus was on the angular resolution of dMRI and a clinical trial was conducted on migraine, specifically between episodic and chronic migraine patients. The number of gradient directions had an impact on white matter analysis results, with statistically significant differences between groups being drastically reduced when using 21 gradient directions instead of the original 61. Fourteen teams from different institutions were tasked to use DL to enhance three diffusion metrics (FA, AD and MD) calculated from data acquired with 21 gradient directions and a b-value of 1000 s/mm2. The goal was to produce results that were comparable to those calculated from 61 gradient directions. The results were evaluated using both standard image quality metrics and Tract-Based Spatial Statistics (TBSS) to compare episodic and chronic migraine patients. The study results suggest that while most DL techniques improved the ability to detect statistical differences between groups, they also led to an increase in false positive. The results showed that there was a constant growth rate of false positives linearly proportional to the new true positives, which highlights the risk of generalization of AI-based tasks when assessing diverse clinical cohorts and training using data from a single group. The methods also showed divergent performance when replicating the original distribution of the data and some exhibited significant bias. In conclusion, extreme caution should be exercised when using AI methods for harmonization or synthesis in clinical studies when processing heterogeneous data in clinical studies, as important information may be altered, even when global metrics such as structural similarity or peak signal-to-noise ratio appear to suggest otherwise.

}, keywords = {Angular resolution, Artificial Intelligence, Deep learning, Diffusion tensor, diffusion MRI, machine learning}, issn = {2213-1582}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nicl.2023.103483}, url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213158223001742}, author = {Santiago Aja-Fern{\'a}ndez and Carmen Mart{\'\i}n-Mart{\'\i}n and {\'A}lvaro Planchuelo-G{\'o}mez and Abrar Faiyaz and Md Nasir Uddin and Giovanni Schifitto and Abhishek Tiwari and Saurabh J. Shigwan and Rajeev Kumar Singh and Tianshu Zheng and Zuozhen Cao and Dan Wu and Stefano B. Blumberg and Snigdha Sen and Tobias Goodwin-Allcock and Paddy J. Slator and Mehmet Yigit Avci and Zihan Li and Berkin Bilgic and Qiyuan Tian and Xinyi Wang and Zihao Tang and Mariano Cabezas and Amelie Rauland and Dorit Merhof and Renata Manzano Maria and Vin{\'\i}cius Paran{\'\i}ba Campos and Tales Santini and Marcelo Andrade da Costa Vieira and SeyyedKazem HashemizadehKolowri and Edward DiBella and Chenxu Peng and Zhimin Shen and Zan Chen and Irfan Ullah and Merry Mani and Hesam Abdolmotalleby and Samuel Eckstrom and Steven H. Baete and Patryk Filipiak and Tanxin Dong and Qiuyun Fan and Rodrigo de Luis-Garc{\'\i}a and Antonio Trist{\'a}n-Vega and Tomasz Pieciak} }