Physics-based network fine-tuning for robust quantitative susceptibility mapping from high-pass filtered phase

Abstract: Purpose: To improve the generalization ability of convolutional neural network (CNN) based prediction of quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) from high-pass filtered phase (HPFP) image. Methods: The proposed network addresses two common generalization issues that arise when using a pre-trained network to predict QSM from HPFP: a) data with unseen voxel sizes, and b) data with unknown high-pass filter parameters. A network fine-tuning step based on a high-pass filtering dipole convolution forward model is proposed to reduce the generalization error of the pre-trained network. A progressive Unet architecture is proposed to improve prediction accuracy without increasing fine-tuning computational cost. Results: In retrospective studies using RMSE, PSNR, SSIM and HFEN as quality metrics, the performance of both Unet and progressive Unet was improved after physics-based fine-tuning at all voxel sizes and most high-pass filtering cutoff frequencies tested in the experiment. Progressive Unet slightly outperformed Unet both before and after fine-tuning. In a prospective study, image sharpness was improved after physics-based fine-tuning for both Unet and progressive Unet. Compared to Unet, progressive Unet had better agreement of regional susceptibility values with reference QSM. Conclusion: The proposed method shows improved robustness compared to the pre-trained network without fine-tuning when the test dataset deviates from training. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jinwei1209/SWI_to_QSM/