2025/06/30 by Bowen Xin, Xin, Bowen, Hickey, Rohan +16
Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced MRI Techniques and Applications #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #FOS: Physical sciences #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Medical Physics (physics.med-ph) #Ultrasound in Clinical Applications #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.23506
openalex publication_date 2025/06/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Lung magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with ultrashort echo-time (UTE) represents a recent breakthrough in lung structure imaging, providing image resolution and quality comparable to computed tomography (CT). Due to the absence of ionising radiation, MRI is often preferred over CT in paediatric diseases such as cystic fibrosis (CF), one of the most common genetic disorders in Caucasians. To assess structural lung damage in CF imaging, CT scoring systems provide valuable quantitative insights for disease diagnosis and progression. However, few quantitative scoring systems are available in structural lung MRI (e.g., UTE-MRI). To provide fast and accurate quantification in lung MRI, we investigated the feasibility of novel Artificial intelligence-assisted Pixel-level Lung (APL) scoring for CF. APL scoring consists of 5 stages, including 1) image loading, 2) AI lung segmentation, 3) lung-bounded slice sampling, 4) pixel-level annotation, and 5) quantification and reporting. The results shows that our APL scoring took 8.2 minutes per subject, which was more than twice as fast as the previous grid-level scoring. Additionally, our pixel-level scoring was statistically more accurate (p=0.021), while strongly correlating with grid-level scoring (R=0.973, p=5.85e-9). This tool has great potential to streamline the workflow of UTE lung MRI in clinical settings, and be extended to other structural lung MRI sequences (e.g., BLADE MRI), and for other lung diseases (e.g., bronchopulmonary dysplasia).