Synthetising myelin water fraction from T1-weighted and T2-weighted data: an image-to-image translation approach

Myelin biomarkers are a fundamental tool for both neuroscience research and clinical applications. Despite several quantitative MRI methods available for their estimation, in several cases qualitative approaches are the only viable solution. To get the best of both the quantitative and qualitative worlds, here we propose an image-to-image translation method to learn the mapping between common routine scans and a quantitative myelin metric. To achieve this goal, we trained a generative adversarial network on a relatively large dataset of healthy subjects. Both the qualitative and quantitative results show good agreement between the predicted and the ground-truth maps.