Deep learning of personalized priors from past MRI scans enables fast, quality-enhanced point-of-care MRI with low-cost systems

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) offers superb-quality images, but its accessibility is limited by high costs, posing challenges for patients requiring longitudinal care. Low-field MRI provides affordable imaging with low-cost devices but is hindered by long scans and degraded image quality, including low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and tissue contrast. We propose a novel healthcare paradigm: using deep learning to extract personalized features from past standard high-field MRI scans and harnessing them to enable accelerated, enhanced-quality follow-up scans with low-cost systems. To overcome the SNR and contrast differences, we introduce ViT-Fuser, a feature-fusion vision transformer that learns features from past scans, e.g. those stored in standard DICOM CDs. We show that textita single prior scan is sufficient, and this scan can come from various MRI vendors, field strengths, and pulse sequences. Experiments with four datasets, including glioblastoma data, low-field (50mT), and ultra-low-field (6.5mT) data, demonstrate that ViT-Fuser outperforms state-of-the-art methods, providing enhanced-quality images from accelerated low-field scans, with robustness to out-of-distribution data. Our freely available framework thus enables rapid, diagnostic-quality, low-cost imaging for wide healthcare applications.