PO.BCS01.13 · 生物信息与计算
一致性引导的扩散重建增强磁粒子成像中肝周肿瘤的可见性
Consistency-guided diffusion reconstruction enhances peri-hepatic tumor visibility in magnetic particle imaging
作者与单位 Authors & Affiliations
摘要 Abstract
中文摘要
背景:磁粒子成像(MPI)无辐射且高度灵敏,能够对超顺磁性示踪剂进行定量追踪,这使其在肿瘤成像中具有吸引力。在腹部应用中,SPIO示踪剂通过肝脏代谢在肝脏中蓄积,形成掩盖邻近病灶并抑制肿瘤对比度的主导性背景。为从重建端解决此问题,我们提出一种一致性引导的扩散方法,将学习到的先验与MPI正演模型相耦合,以在不改变硬件或示踪剂配方的情况下恢复浓度保真的肝周图像。
方法:我们实现了一种一致性引导的扩散流程,交替执行两个步骤:(i)通过在腹部切片上训练的生成式扩散先验进行去噪,以及(ii)一个轻量级投影,强制在MPI正演算子u=Sx下与测量信号保持一致。当肝-肿瘤浓度差异较大时,一个零空间稳定项可调节轨迹。训练数据通过从公共腹部数据集中提取肝脏和肿瘤掩膜、推导浓度图并形成z轴切片来合成;模拟信号通过加性高斯白噪声生成。评估涵盖(a)肝周模拟病例和(b)在自建MPI系统上填充SPIO的3D打印肝-肿瘤模体。基线方法包括Kaczmarz、共轭梯度、ADMM和深度平衡重建。
结果:与经典求解器相比,所提出的方法改善了保真度和结构保持(更高的PSNR/SSIM和更低的误差),并减少了基于平衡的方法典型的过度平滑。在肿瘤-肝脏间距为5 mm和2 mm的模体研究中,重建结果显示背景条纹/环状伪影受到抑制、病灶边缘更清晰,在不同间距下产生一致的视觉可检测性。运行时开销适中:每个扩散步骤进行一次CG更新即足以维持一致性。我们还将该方法应用于体内人类干细胞MPI成像实验,产生了令人鼓舞的结果,提示其对基于干细胞的癌症治疗具有潜在效用。
结论:一致性引导的扩散重建在强肝脏背景下改善了MPI中肝周病灶的可见性,同时保持纯软件且系统无关。其低运行成本以及与现有扫描仪和示踪剂的兼容性,支持其在肝脏邻近肿瘤成像中的转化潜力。
查看英文原文 English abstract
Background: Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI) is radiation-free and highly sensitive, enabling quantitative tracking of superparamagnetic tracers, which makes it attractive for tumor imaging. In abdominal applications, SPIO tracers accumulate in the liver via hepatic metabolism, creating dominant background that obscures nearby lesions and suppresses tumor contrast. To address this from the reconstruction side, we propose a consistency-guided diffusion method that couples a learned prior with the MPI forward model to recover concentration-faithful peri-hepatic images, without altering hardware or tracer formulation.
Methods: We implement a consistency-guided diffusion procedure that alternates two steps: (i) denoising by a generative diffusion prior trained on abdominal slices, and (ii) a lightweight projection that enforces agreement with measured signals under the MPI forward operator u=Sx. A null-space stabilization term moderates trajectories when liver-tumor concentration disparity is large. Training data are synthesized from public abdominal datasets by extracting liver and tumor masks, deriving concentration maps, and forming z-axis slices; simulated signals are generated with additive white Gaussian noise. Evaluation covers (a) peri-hepatic simulation cases and (b) 3D-printed liver-tumor phantoms filled with SPIOs on an in-house MPI system. Baselines include Kaczmarz, conjugate gradient, ADMM, and a deep-equilibrium reconstruction.
Results: The proposed approach improves fidelity and structure preservation versus classical solvers (higher PSNR/SSIM and lower error) and reduces the over-smoothing typical of equilibrium-based methods. In phantom studies with 5 mm and 2 mm tumor-liver separations, reconstructions exhibit suppressed background streaks/rings and clearer lesion edges, yielding consistent visual detectability across separations. Runtime overhead is modest: a single CG update per diffusion step suffices to maintain consistency. We also applied the method to in vivo human stem-cell MPI imaging experiment, yielding encouraging results and suggesting potential utility for stem cell-based cancer therapies.
Conclusions: Consistency-guided diffusion reconstruction improves peri-hepatic lesion visibility in MPI under strong liver background while remaining software-only and system-agnostic. Its low operational cost and compatibility with existing scanners and tracers support translational potential for liver-adjacent oncologic imaging.
利益披露 Disclosure
G. Shi, None..
Z. Chen, None..
Z. Zhang, None..
X. Feng, None.