用无增强MRI生成多期增强MRI,提升肝癌诊断安全与效率
T-CACE: A Time-Conditioned Autoregressive Contrast Enhancement Multi-Task Framework for Contrast-Free Liver MRI Synthesis, Segmentation, and Diagnosis
- 通过时序条件编码融合解剖结构与时间相位信息
- 生成图像在多期间过渡自然,分类准确率超现有方法
- 适合医学影像研究者与临床医生参考应用
磁共振成像(MRI)是肝癌诊断的主流手段,显著提升了病灶分类与患者预后。然而传统MRI存在对比剂注射风险、人工评估耗时及标注数据集有限等问题。为此,我们提出时间条件自回归对比增强(T-CACE)框架,可直接从非增强MRI(NCMRI)合成多期增强MRI(CEMRI)。T-CACE引入三项核心创新:条件令牌编码(CTE)将解剖先验与时间相位信息统一嵌入潜在表示;动态时间感知注意力掩码(DTAM)采用高斯衰减机制自适应调节跨期信息流,确保各期间过渡平滑且符合生理规律;此外,时间分类一致性约束(TCC)使病灶分类输出与生理信号演化一致,进一步提升诊断可靠性。在两个独立肝癌MRI数据集上的实验表明,T-CACE在图像合成、分割与病灶分类任务中均优于当前最优方法。该框架为临床提供一种安全高效、可靠的替代方案,显著提升肝病灶评估的安全性、效率与可信度。代码已开源:https://github.com/xiaojiao929/T-CACE。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a leading modality for the diagnosis of liver cancer, significantly improving the classification of the lesion and patient outcomes. However, traditional MRI faces challenges including risks from contrast agent (CA) administration, time-consuming manual assessment, and limited annotated datasets. To address these limitations, we propose a Time-Conditioned Autoregressive Contrast Enhancement (T-CACE) framework for synthesizing multi-phase contrast-enhanced MRI (CEMRI) directly from non-contrast MRI (NCMRI). T-CACE introduces three core innovations: a conditional token encoding (CTE) mechanism that unifies anatomical priors and temporal phase information into latent representations; and a dynamic time-aware attention mask (DTAM) that adaptively modulates inter-phase information flow using a Gaussian-decayed attention mechanism, ensuring smooth and physiologically plausible transitions across phases. Furthermore, a constraint for temporal classification consistency (TCC) aligns the lesion classification output with the evolution of the physiological signal, further enhancing diagnostic reliability. Extensive experiments on two independent liver MRI datasets demonstrate that T-CACE outperforms state-of-the-art methods in image synthesis, segmentation, and lesion classification. This framework offers a clinically relevant and efficient alternative to traditional contrast-enhanced imaging, improving safety, diagnostic efficiency, and reliability for the assessment of liver lesion. The implementation of T-CACE is publicly available at: https://github.com/xiaojiao929/T-CACE.
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