Generalized Brain Image Synthesis with Transferable Convolutional Sparse Coding Networks

High inter-equipment variability and expensive examination costs of brain imaging remain key challenges in leveraging the heterogeneous scans effectively. Despite rapid growth in image-to-image translation with deep learning models, the target brain data may not always be achievable due to the specific attributes of brain imaging. In this paper, we present a novel generalized brain image synthesis method, powered by our transferable convolutional sparse coding networks, to address the lack of interpretable cross-modal medical image representation learning. The proposed approach masters the ability to imitate the machine-like anatomically meaningful imaging by translating features directly under a series of mathematical processings, leading to the reduced domain discrepancy while enhancing model transferability. Specifically, we first embed the globally normalized features into a domain discrepancy metric to learn the domain-invariant representations, then optimally preserve domain-specific geometrical property to reflect the intrinsic graph structures, and further penalize their subspace mismatching to reduce the generalization error. The overall framework is cast in a minimax setting, and the extensive experiments show that the proposed method yields state-of-the-art results on multiple datasets.