Challenges & Future Directions of AI methods in musculoskeletal MRI
Florian Knoll1
1FAU Erlangen Nuremberg, Germany

Synopsis

Keywords: Musculoskeletal: Joints, Image acquisition: Machine learning, Image acquisition: Artefacts

This talk will highlight potential issues during the translation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods from basic science to clinical use. Using selected examples, we will discuss these challenges and how they can be addressed.

Highlights

Introduce the potential that AI methods have for musculoskeletal MRI, while at the same time pointing out issues that can be encountered.

Target audience

Clinicians and researchers interested in AI methods for musculoskeletal MRI.

Outcome/Objective

To provide an overview of the opportunities and challenges associated with the use of AI for musculoskeletal MRI.

Purpose

Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods, in particular Deep Learning (DL)1 methods have shown substantial potential to improve the workflow in all aspects of medical imaging, from data acquisition to image reconstruction, image enhancement, image analysis and diagnostic classification2. However, the translation of these basic science developments to tools that can really be used in daily clinical practice is not without challenges. DL models require large amounts of training data and computational resources for training. This not only leads to substantial costs associated with data curation, labeling and high-performance computing, but also raises legal questions regarding patient privacy. There are also methodological challenges that can lead to failure of DL-models during deployment. These are mostly due to unexpected domain shifts between training and inference after deployment, inconsistencies in the input data caused by incorrect data preprocessing or general misuse of the technology. In this lecture, we will cover examples for these challenges from the areas of musculoskeletal image acquisition, reconstruction, and analysis. In particular, we will discuss findings from the recent fastMRI challenges on image reconstruction for accelerated acquisitions3,4,5. We will also cover future research directions that are targeted at overcoming these challenges.

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges funding support from NIH R01EB024532, NIH P41EB017183, DFG 513220538 and DFG 512819079. The author also gratefully acknowledges the scientific support and HPC resources provided by the Erlangen National High Performance Computing Center (NHR@FAU) of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) under the NHR project b143dc. NHR funding is provided by federal and Bavarian state authorities. NHR@FAU hardware is partially funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) – 440719683.

References

1. Y. LeCun, Y. Bengio, and G. Hinton, “Deep learning,” Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, pp. 436–444, 2015.

2. G. Wang, “Perspective on Deep Imaging”, IEEE Access 8914-8924 (2016).

3. Knoll F, Zbontar J, Sriram A, Muckley MJ, Bruno M, Defazio A, Parente M, Geras KJ, Katsnelson J, Chandarana H, Zhang Z, Drozdzal M, Romero A, Rabbat M, Vincent P, Pinkerton J, Wang D, Yakubova N, Owens E, Zitnick CL, Recht MP, Sodickson DK, Lui YW. fastMRI: a publicly available raw k-space and DICOM dataset for accelerated MR image reconstruction using machine learning. Radiology Artificial Intelligence (2:2020).

4. Knoll F, Murrel T, Sriram A, Yakubova N, Zbontar J, Rabbat M, Defazio A, Muckley MJ, Sodickson DK, Zitnick CL, Recht MP. Advancing machine learning for MR image reconstruction with an open competition: Overview of the 2019 fastMRI challenge. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, 84:3054–3070 (2020).

5. Muckley M, Riemenschneider B, Radmanesh A, Kim S, Jeong G, Ko J, Jun Y, Shin H, Hwang D, Mostapha M, Arberet S, Nickel D, Ramzi Z, Ciuciu P, Starck JL, Teuwen J, Karkalousos D, Zhang C, Sriram A, Huang Z, Yakubova N, Lui Y, Knoll F. Results of the 2020 fastMRI Challenge for Machine Learning MR Image Reconstruction. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 40: 2306-2317 (2021).

Proc. Intl. Soc. Mag. Reson. Med. 31 (2023)