SLMT-Net: A Self-supervised Learning based Multi-scale Transformer Network for Cross-Modality MR Image Synthesis

Cross-modality magnetic resonance (MR) image synthesis aims to produce missing modalities from existing ones. Currently, several methods based on deep neural networks have been developed using both source- and target-modalities in a supervised learning manner. However, it remains challenging to obtain a large amount of completely paired multi-modal training data, which inhibits the effectiveness of existing methods. In this paper, we propose a novel Self-supervised Learning-based Multi-scale Transformer Network (SLMT-Net) for cross-modality MR image synthesis, consisting of two stages, \ie, a pre-training stage and a fine-tuning stage. During the pre-training stage, we propose an Edge-preserving Masked AutoEncoder (Edge-MAE), which preserves the contextual and edge information by simultaneously conducting the image reconstruction and the edge generation. Besides, a patch-wise loss is proposed to treat the input patches differently regarding their reconstruction difficulty, by measuring the difference between the reconstructed image and the ground-truth. In this case, our Edge-MAE can fully leverage a large amount of unpaired multi-modal data to learn effective feature representations. During the fine-tuning stage, we present a Multi-scale Transformer U-Net (MT-UNet) to synthesize the target-modality images, in which a Dual-scale Selective Fusion (DSF) module is proposed to fully integrate multi-scale features extracted from the encoder of the pre-trained Edge-MAE. Moreover, we use the pre-trained encoder as a feature consistency module to measure the difference between high-level features of the synthesized image and the ground truth one. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed SLMT-Net, and our model can reliably synthesize high-quality images when the training set is partially unpaired. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/lyhkevin/SLMT-Net.