# Segmentation-free PVC for Cardiac SPECT using a Densely-connected Multi-dimensional Dynamic Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.12344 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12344/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Convolution: Attention over Convolution Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03458/) (2019)
- [CondConv: Conditionally Parameterized Convolutions for Efficient Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04971/) (2019)
- [3D Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Network for Low-Dose CT via Transfer Learning from a 2D Trained Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05656/) (2018)
- [A Perspective on Deep Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04375/) (2016)
- [Deep Encoder-decoder Adversarial Reconstruction (DEAR) Network for 3D CT from Few-view Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05880/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Simultaneous Deep Learning of Myocardium Segmentation and T2 Quantification for Acute Myocardial Infarction MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10570/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In nuclear imaging, limited resolution causes partial volume effects (PVEs) that affect image sharpness and quantitative accuracy. Partial volume correction (PVC) methods incorporating high-resolution anatomical information from CT or MRI have been demonstrated to be effective. However, such anatomical-guided methods typically require tedious image registration and segmentation steps. Accurately segmented organ templates are also hard to obtain, particularly in cardiac SPECT imaging, due to the lack of hybrid SPECT/CT scanners with high-end CT and associated motion artifacts. Slight mis-registration/mis-segmentation would result in severe degradation in image quality after PVC. In this work, we develop a deep-learning-based method for fast cardiac SPECT PVC without anatomical information and associated organ segmentation. The proposed network involves a densely-connected multi-dimensional dynamic mechanism, allowing the convolutional kernels to be adapted based on the input images, even after the network is fully trained. Intramyocardial blood volume (IMBV) is introduced as an additional clinical-relevant loss function for network optimization. The proposed network demonstrated promising performance on 28 canine studies acquired on a GE Discovery NM/CT 570c dedicated cardiac SPECT scanner with a 64-slice CT using Technetium-99m-labeled red blood cells. This work showed that the proposed network with densely-connected dynamic mechanism produced superior results compared with the same network without such mechanism. Results also showed that the proposed network without anatomical information could produce images with statistically comparable IMBV measurements to the images generated by anatomical-guided PVC methods, which could be helpful in clinical translation.