# Synthesizing MR Image Contrast Enhancement Using 3D High-resolution ConvNets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01592 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01592/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05747/) (2017)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [CheXNet: Radiologist-Level Pneumonia Detection on Chest X-Rays with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05225/) (2017)
- [Deep Laplacian Pyramid Networks for Fast and Accurate Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03915/) (2017)
- [BBN: Bilateral-Branch Network with Cumulative Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02413/) (2019)
- [Learning a Variational Network for Reconstruction of Accelerated MRI Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00447/) (2017)
- [Efficient Multi-Scale 3D CNN with Fully Connected CRF for Accurate Brain Lesion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05959/) (2016)
- [Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Computer-Aided Detection: CNN Architectures, Dataset Characteristics and Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.03409/) (2016)
- [Low Dose CT Image Denoising Using a Generative Adversarial Network with Wasserstein Distance and Perceptual Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00961/) (2017)
- [MedGAN: Medical Image Translation using GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06397/) (2018)
- [Image Synthesis in Multi-Contrast MRI with Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01221/) (2018)
- [Medical Image Synthesis with Context-Aware Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05362/) (2016)
- [Deep MR to CT Synthesis using Unpaired Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01155/) (2017)
- [Hi-Net: Hybrid-fusion Network for Multi-modal MR Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05000/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning COVID-19 Features on CXR using Limited Training Data Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05758/) (2020)
- [Simultaneous Super-Resolution and Cross-Modality Synthesis of 3D Medical Images using Weakly-Supervised Joint Convolutional Sparse Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02596/) (2017)
- [Deep Embedding Convolutional Neural Network for Synthesizing CT Image from T1-Weighted MR Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02073/) (2017)
- [Substituting Gadolinium in Brain MRI Using DeepContrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05551/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [One Model to Synthesize Them All: Multi-contrast Multi-scale Transformer for Missing Data Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13738/) (2022)
- [Simulating Dynamic Tumor Contrast Enhancement in Breast MRI using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18872/) (2024)
- [MRI Contrast Enhancement Kinetics World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19285/) (2026)
- [Brain MRI-to-PET Synthesis using 3D Convolutional Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12082/) (2022)
- [Uncertainty-guided Generation of Dark-field Radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15859/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

textitObjective: Gadolinium-based contrast agents (GBCAs) have been widely used to better visualize disease in brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, gadolinium deposition within the brain and body has raised safety concerns about the use of GBCAs. Therefore, the development of novel approaches that can decrease or even eliminate GBCA exposure while providing similar contrast information would be of significant use clinically. textitMethods: In this work, we present a deep learning based approach for contrast-enhanced T1 synthesis on brain tumor patients. A 3D high-resolution fully convolutional network (FCN), which maintains high resolution information through processing and aggregates multi-scale information in parallel, is designed to map pre-contrast MRI sequences to contrast-enhanced MRI sequences. Specifically, three pre-contrast MRI sequences, T1, T2 and apparent diffusion coefficient map (ADC), are utilized as inputs and the post-contrast T1 sequences are utilized as target output. To alleviate the data imbalance problem between normal tissues and the tumor regions, we introduce a local loss to improve the contribution of the tumor regions, which leads to better enhancement results on tumors. textitResults: Extensive quantitative and visual assessments are performed, with our proposed model achieving a PSNR of 28.24dB in the brain and 21.2dB in tumor regions. textitConclusion and Significance: Our results suggest the potential of substituting GBCAs with synthetic contrast images generated via deep learning. Code is available at urlhttps://github.com/chenchao666/Contrast-enhanced-MRI-Synthesis