Bayesian Uncertainty Estimation of Learned Variational MRI Reconstruction

Dominik Narnhofer, Alexander Effland, Erich Kobler, Kerstin Hammernik, Florian Knoll, Thomas Pock

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Recent deep learning approaches focus on improving quantitative scores of dedicated benchmarks, and therefore only reduce the observation-related (aleatoric) uncertainty. However, the model-immanent (epistemic) uncertainty is less frequently systematically analyzed. In this work, we introduce a Bayesian variational framework to quantify the epistemic uncertainty. To this end, we solve the linear inverse problem of undersampled MRI reconstruction in a variational setting. The associated energy functional is composed of a data fidelity term and the total deep variation (TDV) as a learned parametric regularizer. To estimate the epistemic uncertainty we draw the parameters of the TDV regularizer from a multivariate Gaussian distribution, whose mean and covariance matrix are learned in a stochastic optimal control problem. In several numerical experiments, we demonstrate that our approach yields competitive results for undersampled MRI reconstruction. Moreover, we can accurately quantify the pixelwise epistemic uncertainty, which can serve radiologists as an additional resource to visualize reconstruction reliability.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)279-291
Number of pages13
JournalIEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
Volume41
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

Keywords

  • Bayes’ theorem
  • convolutional neural network
  • epistemic uncertainty estimation
  • image reconstruction
  • magnetic resonance imaging
  • total deep variation
  • undersampled MRI

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Radiological and Ultrasound Technology
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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