Fourier PD and PDUNet: Complex-valued networks to speed-up MR Thermometry during Hyperthermia

Abstract Hyperthermia (HT) in combination with radio-and/or chemotherapy has become an accepted cancer treatment for distinct solid tumour entities. In HT, tumour tissue is exogenously heated to temperatures of 39 to 43 °C for 60 minutes. Temperature monitoring can be performed noninvasively using dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, the slow nature of MRI leads to motion artefacts in the images due to the movements of patients during image acquisition time. By discarding parts of the data, the speed of the acquisition can be increased-known as Undersampling. However, due to the invalidation of the Nyquist criterion, the acquired images have lower resolution and can also produce artefacts. The aim of this work was, therefore, to reconstruct highly undersampled MR thermometry acquisitions with better resolution and with less artefacts compared to conventional techniques like compressed sensing. The use of deep learning in the medical field has emerged in recent times, and various studies have shown that deep learning has the potential to solve inverse problems such as MR image reconstruction. However, most of the published work only focusses on the magnitude images, while the phase images are ignored, which are fundamental requirements for MR thermometry. This work, for the first time ever, presents deep learning based solutions for reconstructing undersampled MR thermometry data. Two different deep learning models have been employed here, the Fourier Primal-Dual network and Fourier Primal-Dual UNet, to reconstruct highly undersampled complex images of MR thermometry. MR images of 44 patients with different sarcoma cancers who have received the HT treatment in a combination of radiotherapy/chemotherapy were used in this study. It was observed that the method was able to reduce the temperature difference between the undersampled MRIs and the fully sampled MRIs from 1.5 °C to 0.5°C.