Mixture of Multi-Sequence Feature Difference for Contrast-Enhanced MRI Synthesis

Jonghun Kim, Junmo Kwon, Hyunjin Park

Contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (CE-MRI) is crucial for accurately diagnosing and segmenting brain tumors. However, the acquisition of CE-MRI requires injecting contrast agents, which poses potential health risks and increases scan costs. Here, we propose a CE-MRI synthesis method from non-contrast sequences, reducing both risk and cost. Unlike existing methods that rely on channel-wise concatenation to fuse multi-sequence information for synthesis, we introduce a Mixture of Feature Difference (MoFD) module. The proposed module uses a dynamic weighting strategy to adaptively select and aggregate informative features from both individual source sequences and explicit differences among them. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms baselines in terms of image fidelity and perceptual quality on the UCSF-PDGM and UPenn-GBM datasets. Our method successfully reconstructs tumor regions and achieves segmentation performance comparable to that obtained with real CE-MRI. Our ablation studies show that although adversarial learning improves perceptual quality, a regression-based variant of our method achieves higher structural…