The potential benefit of hybrid X-ray and MR imaging in the interventional environment is large due to the combination of fast imaging with high contrast variety. However, a vast amount of existing image enhancement methods requires the image information of both modalities to be present in the same domain. To unlock this potential, we present a solution to image-to-image translation from MR projections to corresponding X-ray projection images. The approach is based on a state-of-the-art image generator network that is modified to fit the specific application. Furthermore, we propose the inclusion of a gradient map in the loss function to allow the network to emphasize high-frequency details in image generation. Our approach is capable of creating X-ray projection images with natural appearance. Additionally, our extensions show clear improvement compared to the baseline method.
@article{arxiv.1804.03955,
title = {Projection image-to-image translation in hybrid X-ray/MR imaging},
author = {Bernhard Stimpel and Christopher Syben and Tobias Würfl and Katharina Breininger and Katrin Mentl and Jonathan M. Lommen and Arnd Dörfler and Andreas Maier},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.03955},
year = {2019}
}