Robust Multi-Contrast MRI Medical Image Translation via Knowledge Distillation and Adversarial Attack

Medical image translation is of great value but is very difficult due to the requirement with style change of noise pattern and anatomy invariance of image content. Various deep learning methods like the mainstream GAN, Transformer and Diffusion models have been developed to learn the multi-modal mapping to obtain the translated images, but the results from the generator are still far from being perfect for medical images. In this paper, we propose a robust multi-contrast translation framework for MRI medical images with knowledge distillation and adversarial attack, which can be integrated with any generator. The additional refinement network consists of teacher and student modules with similar structures but different inputs. Unlike the existing knowledge distillation works, our teacher module is designed as a registration network with more inputs to better learn the noise distribution well and further refine the translated results in the training stage. The knowledge is then well distilled to the student module to ensure that better translation results are generated. We also introduce an adversarial attack module before the generator. Such a black-box attacker can generate meaningful perturbations and adversarial examples throughout the training process. Our model has been tested on two public MRI medical image datasets considering different types and levels of perturbations, and each designed module is verified by the ablation study. The extensive experiments and comparison with SOTA methods have strongly demonstrated our model’s superiority of refinement and robustness.