Synthesising images and labels between mr sequence types with cycleGAN

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019. Real-time (RT) sequences for cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) have recently been proposed as alternatives to standard cine CMR sequences for subjects unable to hold the breath or suffering from arrhythmia. RT image acquisitions during free breathing produce comparatively poor quality images, a trade-off necessary to achieve the high temporal resolution needed for RT imaging and hence are less suitable in the clinical assessment of cardiac function. We demonstrate the application of a CycleGAN architecture to train autoencoder networks for synthesising cine-like images from RT images and vice versa. Applying this conversion to real-time data produces clearer images with sharper distinctions between myocardial and surrounding tissues, giving clinicians a more precise means of visually inspecting subjects. Furthermore, applying the transformation to segmented cine data to produce pseudo-real-time images allows this label information to be transferred to the real-time image domain. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by training a U-net based architecture using these pseudo-real-time images which can effectively segment actual real-time images.