Feasibility of new fat suppression for breast MRI using pix2pix.

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Abstract

To generate and evaluate fat-saturated T1-weighted (FST1W) image synthesis of breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) using pix2pix.
We collected pairs of noncontrast-enhanced T1-weighted an FST1W images of breast MRI for training data (2112 pairs from 15 patients), validation data (428 pairs from three patients), and test data (90 pairs from 30 patients). From the original images, 90 synthetic images were generated with 50, 100, and 200 epochs using pix2pix. Two breast radiologists evaluated the synthetic images (from 1 = excellent to 5 = very poor) for quality of fat suppression, anatomic structures, artifacts, etc. The average score was analyzed for each epoch and breast density.
The synthetic images were scored from 2.95 to 3.60; the best was reduction in artifacts when using 100 epochs. The average overall quality scores for fat suppression were 3.63 at 50 epochs, 3.24 at 100 epochs, and 3.12 at 200 epochs. In the analysis for breast density, each score was significantly better for nondense breasts than for dense breasts; the average score was 2.88-3.18 for nondense breasts and 3.03-3.42 for dense breasts (P = 0.000-0.042).
Pix2pix had the potential to generate FST1W synthesis for breast MRI.