10,16,2021

 Adversarial Regularizers in Inverse Problems2019-01-11   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Inverse Problems in medical imaging and computer vision are traditionally solved using purely model-based methods. Among those variational regularization models are one of the most popular approaches. We propose a new framework for applying data-driven approaches to inverse problems, using a neural network as a regularization functional. The network learns to discriminate between the distribution of ground truth images and the distribution of unregularized reconstructions. Once trained, the network is applied to the inverse problem by solving the corresponding variational problem. Unlike other data-based approaches for inverse problems, the algorithm can be applied even if only unsupervised training data is available. Experiments demonstrate the potential of the framework for denoising on the BSDS dataset and for computed tomography reconstruction on the LIDC dataset. Regularization of Inverse Problems by Neural Networks2020-06-06   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Inverse problems arise in a variety of imaging applications including computed tomography, non-destructive testing, and remote sensing. The characteristic features of inverse problems are the non-uniqueness and instability of their solutions. Therefore, any reasonable solution method requires the use of regularization tools that select specific solutions and at the same time stabilize the inversion process. Recently, data-driven methods using deep learning techniques and neural networks demonstrated to significantly outperform classical solution methods for inverse problems. In this chapter, we give an overview of inverse problems and demonstrate the necessity of regularization concepts for their solution. We show that neural networks can be used for the data-driven solution of inverse problems and review existing deep learning methods for inverse problems. In particular, we view these deep learning methods from the perspective of regularization theory, the mathematical foundation of stable solution methods for inverse problems. This chapter is more than just a review as many of the presented theoretical results extend existing ones. Learned convex regularizers for inverse problems2020-08-06   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ We consider the variational reconstruction framework for inverse problems and propose to learn a data-adaptive input-convex neural network (ICNN) as the regularization functional. The ICNN-based convex regularizer is trained adversarially to discern ground-truth images from unregularized reconstructions. Convexity of the regularizer is attractive since (i) one can establish analytical convergence guarantees for the corresponding variational reconstruction problem and (ii) devise efficient and provable algorithms for reconstruction. In particular, we show that the optimal solution to the variational problem converges to the ground-truth if the penalty parameter decays sub-linearly with respect to the norm of the noise. Further, we prove the existence of a subgradient-based algorithm that leads to monotonically decreasing error in the parameter space with iterations. To demonstrate the performance of our approach for solving inverse problems, we consider the tasks of deblurring natural images and reconstructing images in computed tomography (CT), and show that the proposed convex regularizer is at least competitive with and sometimes superior to state-of-the-art data-driven techniques for inverse problems. Deep Learning Methods for Solving Linear Inverse Problems: Research Directions and Paradigms2020-07-26   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ The linear inverse problem is fundamental to the development of various scientific areas. Innumerable attempts have been carried out to solve different variants of the linear inverse problem in different applications. Nowadays, the rapid development of deep learning provides a fresh perspective for solving the linear inverse problem, which has various well-designed network architectures results in state-of-the-art performance in many applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the recent progress in the development of deep learning for solving various linear inverse problems. We review how deep learning methods are used in solving different linear inverse problems, and explore the structured neural network architectures that incorporate knowledge used in traditional methods. Furthermore, we identify open challenges and potential future directions along this research line. Joint learning of variational representations and solvers for inverse problems with partially-observed data2020-06-05   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Designing appropriate variational regularization schemes is a crucial part of solving inverse problems, making them better-posed and guaranteeing that the solution of the associated optimization problem satisfies desirable properties. Recently, learning-based strategies have appeared to be very efficient for solving inverse problems, by learning direct inversion schemes or plug-and-play regularizers from available pairs of true states and observations. In this paper, we go a step further and design an end-to-end framework allowing to learn actual variational frameworks for inverse problems in such a supervised setting. The variational cost and the gradient-based solver are both stated as neural networks using automatic differentiation for the latter. We can jointly learn both components to minimize the data reconstruction error on the true states. This leads to a data-driven discovery of variational models. We consider an application to inverse problems with incomplete datasets (image inpainting and multivariate time series interpolation). We experimentally illustrate that this framework can lead to a significant gain in terms of reconstruction performance, including w.r.t. the direct minimization of the variational formulation derived from the known generative model. Task adapted reconstruction for inverse problems2018-08-27   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ The paper considers the problem of performing a task defined on a model parameter that is only observed indirectly through noisy data in an ill-posed inverse problem. A key aspect is to formalize the steps of reconstruction and task as appropriate estimators (non-randomized decision rules) in statistical estimation problems. The implementation makes use of (deep) neural networks to provide a differentiable parametrization of the family of estimators for both steps. These networks are combined and jointly trained against suitable supervised training data in order to minimize a joint differentiable loss function, resulting in an end-to-end task adapted reconstruction method. The suggested framework is generic, yet adaptable, with a plug-and-play structure for adjusting both the inverse problem and the task at hand. More precisely, the data model (forward operator and statistical model of the noise) associated with the inverse problem is exchangeable, e.g., by using neural network architecture given by a learned iterative method. Furthermore, any task that is encodable as a trainable neural network can be used. The approach is demonstrated on joint tomographic image reconstruction, classification and joint tomographic image reconstruction segmentation. Denoising Score-Matching for Uncertainty Quantification in Inverse Problems2020-11-16   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Deep neural networks have proven extremely efficient at solving a wide rangeof inverse problems, but most often the uncertainty on the solution they provideis hard to quantify. In this work, we propose a generic Bayesian framework forsolving inverse problems, in which we limit the use of deep neural networks tolearning a prior distribution on the signals to recover. We adopt recent denoisingscore matching techniques to learn this prior from data, and subsequently use it aspart of an annealed Hamiltonian Monte-Carlo scheme to sample the full posteriorof image inverse problems. We apply this framework to Magnetic ResonanceImage (MRI) reconstruction and illustrate how this approach not only yields highquality reconstructions but can also be used to assess the uncertainty on particularfeatures of a reconstructed image. Numerical Solution of Inverse Problems by Weak Adversarial Networks2020-02-26   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ We consider a weak adversarial network approach to numerically solve a class of inverse problems, including electrical impedance tomography and dynamic electrical impedance tomography problems. We leverage the weak formulation of PDE in the given inverse problem, and parameterize the solution and the test function as deep neural networks. The weak formulation and the boundary conditions induce a minimax problem of a saddle function of the network parameters. As the parameters are alternatively updated, the network gradually approximates the solution of the inverse problem. We provide theoretical justifications on the convergence of the proposed algorithm. Our method is completely mesh-free without any spatial discretization, and is particularly suitable for problems with high dimensionality and low regularity on solutions. Numerical experiments on a variety of test inverse problems demonstrate the promising accuracy and efficiency of our approach. Applications of Deep Learning for Ill-Posed Inverse Problems Within Optical Tomography2020-03-21   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Increasingly in medical imaging has emerged an issue surrounding the reconstruction of noisy images from raw measurement data. Where the forward problem is the generation of raw measurement data from a ground truth image, the inverse problem is the reconstruction of those images from the measurement data. In most cases with medical imaging, classical inverse Radon transforms, such as an inverse Fourier transform for MRI, work well for recovering clean images from the measured data. Unfortunately in the case of X-Ray CT, where undersampled data is very common, more than this is needed to resolve faithful and usable images. In this paper, we explore the history of classical methods for solving the inverse problem for X-Ray CT, followed by an analysis of the state of the art methods that utilize supervised deep learning. Finally, we will provide some possible avenues for research in the future. Medical image reconstruction with image-adaptive priors learned by use of generative adversarial networks2020-01-27   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Medical image reconstruction is typically an ill-posed inverse problem. In order to address such ill-posed problems, the prior distribution of the sought after object property is usually incorporated by means of some sparsity-promoting regularization. Recently, prior distributions for images estimated using generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown great promise in regularizing some of these image reconstruction problems. In this work, we apply an image-adaptive GAN-based reconstruction method (IAGAN) to reconstruct high fidelity images from incomplete medical imaging data. It is observed that the IAGAN method can potentially recover fine structures in the object that are relevant for medical diagnosis but may be oversmoothed in reconstructions with traditional sparsity-promoting regularization. Solving Inverse Computational Imaging Problems using Deep Pixel-level Prior2018-04-23   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Signal reconstruction is a challenging aspect of computational imaging as it often involves solving ill-posed inverse problems. Recently, deep feed-forward neural networks have led to state-of-the-art results in solving various inverse imaging problems. However, being task specific, these networks have to be learned for each inverse problem. On the other hand, a more flexible approach would be to learn a deep generative model once and then use it as a signal prior for solving various inverse problems. We show that among the various state of the art deep generative models, autoregressive models are especially suitable for our purpose for the following reasons. First, they explicitly model the pixel level dependencies and hence are capable of reconstructing low-level details such as texture patterns and edges better. Second, they provide an explicit expression for the image prior which can then be used for MAP based inference along with the forward model. Third, they can model long range dependencies in images which make them ideal for handling global multiplexing as encountered in various compressive imaging systems. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach in solving three computational imaging problems: Single Pixel Camera (SPC), LiSens and FlatCam. For both real and simulated cases, we obtain better reconstructions than the state-of-the-art methods in terms of perceptual and quantitative metrics. Learning Personalized Representation for Inverse Problems in Medical Imaging Using Deep Neural Network2018-07-04   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Recently deep neural networks have been widely and successfully applied in computer vision tasks and attracted growing interests in medical imaging. One barrier for the application of deep neural networks to medical imaging is the need of large amounts of prior training pairs, which is not always feasible in clinical practice. In this work we propose a personalized representation learning framework where no prior training pairs are needed, but only the patient's own prior images. The representation is expressed using a deep neural network with the patient's prior images as network input. We then applied this novel image representation to inverse problems in medical imaging in which the original inverse problem was formulated as a constraint optimization problem and solved using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm. Anatomically guided brain positron emission tomography (PET) image reconstruction and image denoising were employed as examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Quantification results based on simulation and real datasets show that the proposed personalized representation framework outperform other widely adopted methods. The LoDoPaB-CT Dataset: A Benchmark Dataset for Low-Dose CT Reconstruction Methods2020-05-03   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Deep Learning approaches for solving Inverse Problems in imaging have become very effective and are demonstrated to be quite competitive in the field. Comparing these approaches is a challenging task since they highly rely on the data and the setup that is used for training. We provide a public dataset of computed tomography images and simulated low-dose measurements suitable for training this kind of methods. With the LoDoPaB-CT Dataset we aim to create a benchmark that allows for a fair comparison. It contains over 40,000 scan slices from around 800 patients selected from the LIDC/IDRI Database. In this paper we describe how we processed the original slices and how we simulated the measurements. We also include first baseline results. A General Framework Combining Generative Adversarial Networks and Mixture Density Networks for Inverse Modeling in Microstructural Materials Design2021-01-25   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Microstructural materials design is one of the most important applications of inverse modeling in materials science. Generally speaking, there are two broad modeling paradigms in scientific applications: forward and inverse. While the forward modeling estimates the observations based on known parameters, the inverse modeling attempts to infer the parameters given the observations. Inverse problems are usually more critical as well as difficult in scientific applications as they seek to explore the parameters that cannot be directly observed. Inverse problems are used extensively in various scientific fields, such as geophysics, healthcare and materials science. However, it is challenging to solve inverse problems, because they usually need to learn a one-to-many non-linear mapping, and also require significant computing time, especially for high-dimensional parameter space. Further, inverse problems become even more difficult to solve when the dimension of input (i.e. observation) is much lower than that of output (i.e. parameters). In this work, we propose a framework consisting of generative adversarial networks and mixture density networks for inverse modeling, and it is evaluated on a materials science dataset for microstructural materials design. Compared with baseline methods, the results demonstrate that the proposed framework can overcome the above-mentioned challenges and produce multiple promising solutions in an efficient manner. Graph Convolutional Networks for Model-Based Learning in Nonlinear Inverse Problems2021-03-28   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ The majority of model-based learned image reconstruction methods in medical imaging have been limited to uniform domains, such as pixelated images. If the underlying model is solved on nonuniform meshes, arising from a finite element method typical for nonlinear inverse problems, interpolation and embeddings are needed. To overcome this, we present a flexible framework to extend model-based learning directly to nonuniform meshes, by interpreting the mesh as a graph and formulating our network architectures using graph convolutional neural networks. This gives rise to the proposed iterative Graph Convolutional Newton's Method (GCNM), which directly includes the forward model into the solution of the inverse problem, while all updates are directly computed by the network on the problem specific mesh. We present results for Electrical Impedance Tomography, a severely ill-posed nonlinear inverse problem that is frequently solved via optimization-based methods, where the forward problem is solved by finite element methods. Results for absolute EIT imaging are compared to standard iterative methods as well as a graph residual network. We show that the GCNM has strong generalizability to different domain shapes, out of distribution data as well as experimental data, from purely simulated training data. Random mesh projectors for inverse problems2018-12-05   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ We propose a new learning-based approach to solve ill-posed inverse problems in imaging. We address the case where ground truth training samples are rare and the problem is severely ill-posed - both because of the underlying physics and because we can only get few measurements. This setting is common in geophysical imaging and remote sensing. We show that in this case the common approach to directly learn the mapping from the measured data to the reconstruction becomes unstable. Instead, we propose to first learn an ensemble of simpler mappings from the data to projections of the unknown image into random piecewise-constant subspaces. We then combine the projections to form a final reconstruction by solving a deconvolution-like problem. We show experimentally that the proposed method is more robust to measurement noise and corruptions not seen during training than a directly learned inverse. Low Shot Learning with Untrained Neural Networks for Imaging Inverse Problems2019-10-23   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Employing deep neural networks as natural image priors to solve inverse problems either requires large amounts of data to sufficiently train expressive generative models or can succeed with no data via untrained neural networks. However, very few works have considered how to interpolate between these no- to high-data regimes. In particular, how can one use the availability of a small amount of data (even $5-25$ examples) to one's advantage in solving these inverse problems and can a system's performance increase as the amount of data increases as well? In this work, we consider solving linear inverse problems when given a small number of examples of images that are drawn from the same distribution as the image of interest. Comparing to untrained neural networks that use no data, we show how one can pre-train a neural network with a few given examples to improve reconstruction results in compressed sensing and semantic image recovery problems such as colorization. Our approach leads to improved reconstruction as the amount of available data increases and is on par with fully trained generative models, while requiring less than $1 \%$ of the data needed to train a generative model. On hallucinations in tomographic image reconstruction2020-12-01   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Tomographic image reconstruction is generally an ill-posed linear inverse problem. Such ill-posed inverse problems are typically regularized using prior knowledge of the sought-after object property. Recently, deep neural networks have been actively investigated for regularizing image reconstruction problems by learning a prior for the object properties from training images. However, an analysis of the prior information learned by these deep networks and their ability to generalize to data that may lie outside the training distribution is still being explored. An inaccurate prior might lead to false structures being hallucinated in the reconstructed image and that is a cause for serious concern in medical imaging. In this work, we propose to illustrate the effect of the prior imposed by a reconstruction method by decomposing the image estimate into generalized measurement and null components. The concept of a hallucination map is introduced for the general purpose of understanding the effect of the prior in regularized reconstruction methods. Numerical studies are conducted corresponding to a stylized tomographic imaging modality. The behavior of different reconstruction methods under the proposed formalism is discussed with the help of the numerical studies. Deep Variational Networks with Exponential Weighting for Learning Computed Tomography2019-06-13   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Tomographic image reconstruction is relevant for many medical imaging modalities including X-ray, ultrasound (US) computed tomography (CT) and photoacoustics, for which the access to full angular range tomographic projections might be not available in clinical practice due to physical or time constraints. Reconstruction from incomplete data in low signal-to-noise ratio regime is a challenging and ill-posed inverse problem that usually leads to unsatisfactory image quality. While informative image priors may be learned using generic deep neural network architectures, the artefacts caused by an ill-conditioned design matrix often have global spatial support and cannot be efficiently filtered out by means of convolutions. In this paper we propose to learn an inverse mapping in an end-to-end fashion via unrolling optimization iterations of a prototypical reconstruction algorithm. We herein introduce a network architecture that performs filtering jointly in both sinogram and spatial domains. To efficiently train such deep network we propose a novel regularization approach based on deep exponential weighting. Experiments on US and X-ray CT data show that our proposed method is qualitatively and quantitatively superior to conventional non-linear reconstruction methods as well as state-of-the-art deep networks for image reconstruction. Fast inference time of the proposed algorithm allows for sophisticated reconstructions in real-time critical settings, demonstrated with US SoS imaging of an ex vivo bovine phantom. Deep Learning-Based Solvability of Underdetermined Inverse Problems in Medical Imaging2020-06-25   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Recently, with the significant developments in deep learning techniques, solving underdetermined inverse problems has become one of the major concerns in the medical imaging domain. Typical examples include undersampled magnetic resonance imaging, interior tomography, and sparse-view computed tomography, where deep learning techniques have achieved excellent performances. Although deep learning methods appear to overcome the limitations of existing mathematical methods when handling various underdetermined problems, there is a lack of rigorous mathematical foundations that would allow us to elucidate the reasons for the remarkable performance of deep learning methods. This study focuses on learning the causal relationship regarding the structure of the training data suitable for deep learning, to solve highly underdetermined inverse problems. We observe that a majority of the problems of solving underdetermined linear systems in medical imaging are highly non-linear. Furthermore, we analyze if a desired reconstruction map can be learnable from the training data and underdetermined system.