Rigorous Uncertainty Estimation for MRI Reconstruction

Deep-learning (DL)-based MRI reconstructions have shown great potential to reduce scan time while maintaining diagnostic image quality. However, their adoption has been plagued with fears that the models will hallucinate or eliminate important anatomical features. To address this issue, we develop a framework to identify when and where a reconstruction model is producing potentially misleading results. Specifically, our framework produces confidence intervals at each pixel of a reconstruction image such that 95% of these intervals contain the true pixel value with high probability. In-vivo 2D knee and brain reconstruction results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed uncertainty estimation framework.