Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2504.02408

Translation of Fetal Brain Ultrasound Images into Pseudo-MRI Images using Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Ultrasound is a widely accessible and cost-effective medical imaging tool commonly used for prenatal evaluation of the fetal brain. However, it has limitations, particularly in the third trimester, where the complexity of the fetal brain requires high image quality for extracting quantitative data. In contrast, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) offers superior image quality and tissue differentiation but is less available, expensive, and requires time-consuming acquisition. Thus, transforming ultrasonic images into an MRI-mimicking display may be advantageous and allow better tissue anatomy presentation. To address this goal, we have examined the use of artificial intelligence, implementing a diffusion model renowned for generating high-quality images. The proposed method, termed "Dual Diffusion Imposed Correlation" (DDIC), leverages a diffusion-based translation methodology, assuming a shared latent space between ultrasound and MRI domains. Model training was obtained utilizing the "HC18" dataset for ultrasound and the "CRL fetal brain atlas" along with the "FeTA " datasets for MRI. The generated pseudo-MRI images provide notable improvements in visual discrimination of brain tissue, especially in the lateral ventricles and the Sylvian fissure, characterized by enhanced contrast clarity. Improvement was demonstrated in Mutual information, Peak signal-to-noise ratio, Fréchet Inception Distance, and Contrast-to-noise ratio. Findings from these evaluations indicate statistically significant superior performance of the DDIC compared to other translation methodologies. In addition, a Medical Opinion Test was obtained from 5 gynecologists. The results demonstrated display improvement in 81% of the tested images. In conclusion, the presented pseudo-MRI images hold the potential for streamlining diagnosis and enhancing clinical outcomes through improved representation.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Naomi Silverstein, Efrat Leibowitz, Ron Beloosesky, Haim Azhari. 2025-04-03. Translation of Fetal Brain Ultrasound Images into Pseudo-MRI Images using Artificial Intelligence. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.02408

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Bridging the Inter-Domain Gap through Low-Level Features for Cross-Modal Medical Image Segmentation

This paper addresses cross-modal medical image segmentation, focusing on MRI-CT transfer in a source-only domain generalization setting. During training, only source-modality samples are available, while unlabeled target-modality images are used for testing. We propose LowBridge, which builds on the observation that cross-modal images share similar low-level features (e.g. edges) as they depict the same types of anatomical structures. Specifically, we first train a generative model to recover the source images from their edge features, followed by training a segmentation model on the generated source images, separately. At test time, edge features from the target images are input to the pretrained generative model to generate source-style target domain images, which are then segmented using the pretrained segmentation network. Experiments on various public datasets demonstrate that LowBridge achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming ten existing approaches. Ablation studies further show that LowBridge is compatible with different types of generative and segmentation models, suggesting its generalizability and potential to benefit from future advances in these models. The code will be available at https://github.com/JoshuaLPF/LowBridge.

eess.IV↗

Revolutionizing Diffusion MRI Microstructure Mapping via Global Inversion

Diffusion MRI microstructure mapping (MM) is conventionally solved voxel by voxel, ignoring the fact that tissue microstructure forms a spatially organized field. This isolation leaves each estimation problem ill-posed and nonconvex. We instead cast MM as a single global inverse problem, reconstructing the entire parameter field jointly from all measurements of a subject. An untrained neural representation supplies implicit spatial priors and eases the nonconvex optimization, requiring no training data, while coregistered T1-weighted anatomy contributes structural guidance that is freely available in standard protocols. On both synthetic and in-vivo data, our method compares favorably with established voxel-wise and learning-based baselines, suggesting global inversion is a promising alternative.

eess.IV↗

LC3EM: Long-Range Context Extrapolation Enhanced Entropy Model for Coordinate-based Overfitting Image Codecs

Coordinate-based overfitting image codecs have attracted increasing attention for their low decoding complexity and independence from cross-image generalization. However, representative approaches such as COOL-CHIC face an inherent entropy-modeling trade-off: lightweight models have limited capacity, while more expressive ones incur additional bitrate overhead from transmitting image-specific parameters. Inspired by the prediction mechanism in traditional codecs, we propose a new entropy-modeling strategy that introduces complementary prediction modes with region-adaptive soft mode selection, rather than relying on a single learned predictor to model diverse types of redundancy. Based on this concept, we develop a Long-Range Context Extrapolation Enhanced Entropy Model (LC3EM), which can be integrated into coordinate-based overfitting codecs. Specifically, a parameter-free Neighborhood-based Linear Extrapolation Mode (NLEM) complements the tiny MLP-based local predictor to exploit long-range contextual redundancy and strongly directional structures. A Minimum-Entropy-Inspired Continuous Mode Selection strategy is designed to adaptively fuse these two complementary modes, while requiring the transmission of only the parameters of a single additional linear layer. Moreover, to alleviate the mismatch between training-time relaxed and actual discrete quantization, we introduce a lightweight iterative latent rounding refinement stage to improve compression performance. Experiments demonstrate consistent improvements across diverse benchmarks, particularly on highly regular computer-generated images. When integrated with COOL-CHIC 4.0, the proposed method achieves BD-rate gains of -3.43\% and -7.69\% on the SIQAD and API datasets, respectively. With COOL-CHIC 5.0 as the backbone, the corresponding gains are -2.88\% and -3.15\%, respectively. The code will be made publicly available soon.

eess.IV↗