Patent ID: 11874359
Assignee: THE GENERAL HOSPITAL CORPORATION
Field: Measurement (Instruments)
Classification: CPC G  A | IPC G

Claim 1:
2. A method for generating at least one of diffusion metrics or diffusion-weighted images of a subject, the method comprising:
(a) accessing magnetic resonance image data with a computer system,
wherein the magnetic resonance image data comprise:
a non-diffusion-weighted image acquired from a subject;
at least six diffusion-weighted images acquired from the subject,
each diffusion-weighted image corresponding to one of six different diffusion-encoding directions;

(b) computing initial diffusion tensor elements from the magnetic resonance image data by using the computer system to fit the magnetic resonance image data to a diffusion tensor model;
(c) accessing a neural network with the computer system, wherein the neural network has been trained on training data to learn a mapping from lower quality diffusion tensor elements to ground-truth diffusion tensor elements;
(d) inputting the initial diffusion tensor elements to the neural network using the computer system, generating output as residual diffusion tensor element data that represents diffusion tensor element differences relative to the ground-truth diffusion tensor elements;
(e) generating updated diffusion tensor elements by combining the initial diffusion tensor elements and the residual diffusion tensor element data with the computer system; and
(f) generating at least one of a diffusion metric or a diffusion-weighted image from the updated diffusion tensor elements using the computer system;
(g) displaying at least one of the diffusion metric or a diffusion-weighted image to a user.